News
President’s Blog: Accessible care a winning election strategy
Friday October 4, 2024
Health is generally, and rightly, a key theme of State and Federal elections. I anticipate that this will be the case for the March 2025 Western Australian poll.
Indeed, the Liberal leader long ago made clear, and recently reiterated, her party’s intention to overturn the Government’s decision to relocate the New Women and Babies Hospital project to Murdoch, rather than building it at QEII in Nedlands. This remains an important issue.
We continue to push for clarity on the plans for mitigating risks associated with the potential delivery of neonates with antenatally-diagnosed, life-threatening surgical conditions in a location that would be relatively distant from current tertiary-level paediatric surgical facilities. It should be part of a broader discussion on the planning and delivery of Statewide maternity services in both the public and private systems.
But the big, overarching issue needing dedicated focus and vision extending beyond the four-year election cycle is access to care — right across the health system. The Government might be sick of being asked about ambulance ramping (and commenting on it as AMA (WA) President does get a bit repetitive), but the underlying problems that cause it have not gone away. We don’t have enough beds. Our linkages with aged care need improvement — and we don’t have enough aged care places. The public hospitals interface poorly with general practice — the most important community-based service that keeps patients out of hospital.
In addition to difficulty accessing EDs and hospital beds, public patients struggle to access outpatient services. Waiting times for outpatient clinics for lower-acuity conditions are in some instances beyond farcical — measured literally in the years and in some cases seemingly indefinite. But lower-acuity conditions still dramatically impact the quality of life of patients and their families. Similarly, elective surgery waiting times are, in many categories, not meeting targets. Private hospitals are facing increasing funding challenges, and this is having flow-on effects to the public system, only compounding difficult access to care. This is all without recapitulating the underfunding of general practice.
We will have more to say as the State election draws closer. But I believe that the party or parties that can produce a cogent vision for high-quality, medically-led, accessible patient care over the next 15 to 20 years will win the support of the State’s doctors and the broader public.
