Ideas@TheCentre
Rudd’s non-solution to hospital crisis a wasteful threat to private practice
Under the $275 million Super Clinics program, the Rudd government is funding the start-up costs involved in bringing together general practitioners and allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists and podiatrists, who want to amalgamate their practices into an initial 36 ‘one-stop shops.’
The Doctors’ Action group is right to be worried about the impact of Super Clinics on the traditional family GP, which have the potential to nationalise Australian general practice.
Why would young doctors buy into an established practice when the alternative is to join a Super Clinic for free with the capital costs paid for courtesy of taxpayers?
The legitimate fear is that state-funded Super Clinics represents creeping socialism and will render private practice uncompetitive. Once it becomes too costly and difficult to establish a private surgery from scratch, future governments might force doctors to work in Super Clinics on a salaried basis.
The official rationale for Super Clinics is to take pressure off overcrowded public hospitals. But in reality, taxpayer’s money is being wasted on a non-solution for the hospital crisis.
Every credible study shows that dangerous hospital overcrowding is caused by the national shortage of hospital beds, which forces over one-third of all seriously ill emergency patients to wait longer than eight hours to be admitted to a public hospital bed.
Yet the Rudd government maintains Super Clinics have already proven worthwhile. A Tasmanian Super Clinic has reportedly reduced the number of people with minor illness turning up at the nearby emergency department by 13%.
A number of previous studies have demonstrated that patients with a cold or sore toe minor conditions account for only between 10 and 15% of total emergency presentations.
The same studies have also shown that treating these patients constitutes a mere a fraction, 2 to 3%, of the total emergency workload, and that it is far cheaper to treat them in the emergency department rather than incur the capital and infrastructure cost of establishing alternative GP facilities.
In other words, diverting ‘GP-style’ patients into Super Clinics is imposing a huge cost per occasion of service on to the federal budget. The Rudd Government’s highly inefficient spending on Super Clinics makes a mockery of its supposed commitment to micro-economic reform.
Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of ‘The False Promise of GP Super Clinics’ and ‘Why Public Hospitals are Overcrowded’.
