Interview - Dr Haikerwal discusses plans for nurse hotline

News Limited newspapers report the Howard Government hopes to have the $40 million hotline set up within 18 months. The idea is to stop people going to emergency departments when they have a minor ailment, therefore shortening waiting times.

Joining me on the line to discuss the idea is Dr Mukesh Haikerwal from the Australian Medical Association. Dr Haikerwal, what is your view of the plan?

DR HAIKERWAL: Good afternoon. This is something that's being put to the heads of Australian Governments meeting in February, and the idea is to have a single access number to a call centre.

If such a thing were to get off the ground it's very important that the local knowledge that's held in each of the areas where there currently are call centres, or currently are such services, need to be maintained in that system. It's very important that services that are talked about are in your own backyard, and not the other side of the country.

The problem of course is: will this reduce the number of people presenting to emergency departments? And the answer is probably not. The people that turn up to emergency departments by and large need to be there, and such a system may well increase the demand of people needing to be seen in general practice or in emergency departments because it's a very difficult thing to make a diagnosis over the phone.

What this does do is it provides a level of additional, I suppose, security or safety where people feel that they've got some form of additional service they can access if they've got a question. But there's no follow-through with this, there's no additional services available through the hospital sector, and there's no additional infrastructure to cope with any extra demand that might be created. So it's a bit of a hollow gesture where people are actually out there with a phone number, but once they've made the phone call there's not an awful lot of follow-through.

COMPERE: It does sound like a great idea. Let's go back to the concept, though, of making a diagnosis of a patient sight unseen. That must be quite a dangerous thing to do.

DR HAIKERWAL: It's a very difficult thing to do. As an experienced general practitioner we're often asked to talk to people over the phone and guide them through what they need to do in certain circumstances, and it's very difficult to know exactly what to do without actually seeing them, because medicine is not just about hearing about symptoms and people's own interpretation of those symptoms, but what they really look like and what they really feel like when making that diagnosis.

So it is fraught, but people who have got simple questions maybe those questions can be answered. But if you have a medical condition that needs to be treated, they need to be seen.

COMPERE: Is there a sense that people are turning up at emergency departments because GPs aren't bulkbilling and they can't afford it?

DR HAIKERWAL: That's a furphy that's been around for some time, and the statistics of the State hospitals' own figures to the Commonwealth Department show that people who are sitting in the emergency departments generally need to be there. Often they've actually been to see their own family doctor and have been asked to go to emergency departments, and because of the sort of ailment that they've turned up with, they're categorised as a GP type patient, but they've already been seen and just need to be sorted through.

What we actually need is more capacity within the emergency system, and more capacity within the hospital system to actually get people processed through emergency and into the hospital to be treated, rather than necessarily sitting, waiting around hospital. In practice, most people who are waiting in the emergency department actually need to be there.