Medical Bodies Call for Rescue Action on Rural Doctor Crisis

Both the AMA and RDAA have identified a range of measures essential to improving services to country patients including better funding for rural hospitals, a rural health obligation, expanded specialist outreach services and better support for patients who have to travel to receive treatment.

At least 1000 doctors are needed urgently in rural and remote Australia to ensure even basic access to healthcare in the bush. Many rural patients now have to wait up to six weeks for a basic consultation or drive hundreds of kilometres to access a doctor.

RDAA and AMA are calling on the Government to move quickly to introduce the following two-tiered support structure.

• a Rural Isolation Payment to be paid to all rural doctors (including GPs, specialists and registrars) to reflect the isolation associated with rural practice; and
• a Rural Procedural and Emergency/On Call Loading to better support rural procedural doctors (including procedural specialists) who provide obstetric, surgical, anaesthetic or primary emergency on-call service in rural communities.

The AMA and RDAA estimate the total cost of this rescue package will be approximately $300 million per year, making it a very cost-effective way of getting and keeping more doctors in the bush and helping keep rural communities and rural health services functioning.

RDAA President Dr Peter Rischbieth said: "The crisis facing rural healthcare is getting worse, not better. There is a point at which governments will no longer be able to turn this crisis around and that point is just around the corner.

"By far the biggest ticket item in getting more doctors to the bush is to urgently introduce real incentive payments that better support them," he said.

AMA President Dr Rosanna Capolingua said: "The AMA strongly supports better incentives for rural doctors. We have one voice behind this proposal demonstrating how critical the situation in country Australia has become.

"It is time to put in place real measures that will see more locally trained doctors take up a career in rural Australia," she said.

The proposed payments would be made through the existing Service Incentive Program and would be calculated as a loading on rural doctors' Medicare billings or as a special payment for salaried rural doctors. The loading would increase with the rurality and isolation of each doctor (as based on the Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas, or RRMA, classification system).