Coronavirus: Non-Covid healthcare under stress, says AMA president Omar Khorshid

There are signs the nation’s health system is already operating beyond capacity, AMA chief Omar Khorshid warns.

Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

AMA president Omar Khorshid has warned the nation’s healthcare system is already operating beyond its capacity and signs of non-Covid healthcare being compromised are beginning to emerge.

Dr Khorshid told a Senate committee scrutinising the government’s response to the Covid crisis on Tuesday that non-covid care had clearly deteriorated since the beginning of the pandemic, which would have “significant impacts” for years to come.

“Our health system was not ready for this pandemic, it has done a lot of preparation at an acute end but we haven’t prepared it to deal with routine healthcare while dealing with Covid healthcare,” he said.

Dr Khorshid said Australia should be aiming for the highest possible vaccination rates, declaring he was very concerned that as the nation opens up “the cracks will widen”.

“We face very significant impacts particularly if we open up too fast or go too far acting ahead of vaccination rates … we should be easing out cautiously, slowly and looking at results before moving to the next phase of opening up.”

Dr Khorshid said 12-15 year olds who want to be vaccinated should be offered a jab before any substantial easing of restrictions in the months ahead.

However he noted the Doherty Institute modelling indicated there wasn’t a lot of difference between health outcomes if children were or weren’t included in the 70 to 80 per cent vaccination targets.

Former Deputy Chief Health Officer Nick Coatsworth told the committee it was time for “cautious optimism” and that he was most worried about states that had experienced minimal covid would prevent the country from moving forward.

He cautioned Australia was in a very different position this year compared to 2020.

“It’s time to inject a little more optimism,” he said. “Covid was a disease that was terribly scary in 2020, and it remains scary, but moving forward we can develop a lot of confidence.”

“The states like Queensland and Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory, that don’t have Covid, sort of look towards the states that have Covid with a significant amount of fear and you can understand that, because they haven’t seen it,” he said.

“It’s almost as though you have to have Covid circulating in your community to get used to it, really. We don’t want to see huge amounts of that, and morbidity associated with it, but nor do we want to make our policy decisions based on the reality of 2020, not the reality of 2021.”

Mary Louise McLaws said the government should take heed of the experience of countries like Singapore and Israel where children infection rates increased after restrictions eased and vaccinate as many young Australians as possible.

She said issues resulting from delays to the rollout had been exacerbated by the Delta strain as young people, who had only recently been given access to vaccines, were those that would spread it.

“What we should have had but didn’t have was enough vaccine to roll it out to those who were going to acquire it and spread it and that’s definitely the 20-39 (age group),” she said.