Federal Election 2022: Australia’s broken health system online roundtable debate

Medical experts have explained how Australia’s health system can be fixed, to remove logjams and get patients the urgent care they need.

One simple, cheap solution to Australia’s crippling hospital crisis is to shift elderly and disabled patients clogging hospital beds into more appropriate care a News Corp health debate has heard.

Former health department chief Professor Stephen Duckett said these types of patients were often spending hundreds of days in a hospital bed they didn’t need because the NDIS and the Aged Care system was too slow to find a more appropriate place for them.

“These people stay hundreds, literally hundreds of days. And the average length of stay for an overnight patient is six or seven days. So if you just get one of those people out, you can admit another 30 or the 20 out of the emergency department,” Professor Duckett said.

Professor Stephen Duckett offered the idea as one practical solution to the massive hospital logjam crisis that is seeing patients dying in ambulances ramped outside overcrowded emergency department.

He joined Medicines Australia’s CEO Liz de Somer and Dr Omar Khorshid, the President of the Australian Medical Association to discuss health issues in a News Corp online election discussion.

Whoever wins the election must lift federal spending on hospitals from 45 to 50 per cent to deal with surgery backlog from the pandemic Professor Duckett and Dr Khorshid agreed.

Labor’s policy to set up 50 urgent care GP clinics would do little to help solve ambulance ramping or the logjam in hospitals, Dr Khorshid said.

However, he said unlike Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese had indicated he would speak to the states about extra hospital funding.

“The Prime Minister has made it very clear that hospitals are a state issue. So that’s a line in the sand,” Dr Khorshid said.

“Anthony Albanese has said he will sit down with the Prime Minister that’s at least an acknowledgement of the reality,” he said.

Ms de Somer welcomed the plans on both sides to cut medicine prices but acknowledged very few patients would benefit.

She called on the leaders of the major parties to do more to speed up access to subsidies for breakthrough new medicines and for changes to the subsidy assessment process to take into account the value of new medicines to patients.

Ms de Somer said she had previously worked as a nurse and understood from her nursing colleagues how burnt out they were after the pressure of Covid.

It was time to give nurses more recognition and higher remuneration, she said.

All the guests agreed more had to be done to overhaul the outdated inadequate 1980’s remuneration of GPs.

Professor Duckett and Dr Khorshid said Medicare rebates needed to be higher for consultations lasting for 15-20 minutes.

The administration of the NDIS came under intense criticism with Professor Duckett accusing it of “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers to stop spending $30 on a person with disability. It is just terrible.”

“It’s really sad that such an extraordinary amount of money is going into a system and yet the users of that system hate it and have got such negative feedback about it. So it’s not meeting the needs of the disabled of Australia,” he said.