Nurse pinning hopes on new way for care

Tasmanian registered nurse Katie Pennington is pinning a huge amount of hope on the funding reforms recommended by the Medicare taskforce.

Registered nurse Katie Pennington at Bicheno, Tasmania, says the current model is ‘completely inadequate’. Picture: Peter Mathew

Tasmanian registered nurse Katie Pennington is pinning a huge amount of hope on the funding reforms recommended by the Medicare taskforce.

She works in the east coast town of Bicheno, which has only two part-time GPs for a population of about 1100 permanent residents, but which swells to thousands during holiday ­periods.

There are no acute care services in Bicheno, and the two closest regional hospitals are an hour’s drive away. Healthcare in the town has to be partly funded by levies imposed by the local council. Ms Pennington says with the current Medicare system, she cannot work to her full scope of practice to assist more patients. This is different from when she worked as a remote area nurse in the NT under the Australian Community Controlled Health Organisations Model of care.

“I’m very used to working in the ACCHO model of care and am really familiar with how well it operates when health services in remote areas get block funding that enables them to deliver services that specifically meet their community’s needs,” she says.

“With the complex healthcare needs in our region here in ­Bicheno, a Medicare fee-for-service based model of primary care is completely inadequate.”

The Strengthening Medicare Taskforce recommended the introduction of a new “blended” funding model – a mixture of fee-for-service and flexible block funding – in order to fund team-based care including nurses and allied health staff.

Rural doctors groups said the Medicare reforms that will follow the release of the taskforce will be critical for regional residents, who get less of the Medicare ­dollar.

“In a country as rich as Australia with supposedly one of the best health systems in the world, the fact that we can’t guarantee a minimum level of healthcare in a lot of our rural and remote communities is an outrage,” said Peta Rutherford, CEO of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia.

Rural Health Commissioner Ruth Stewart was on the Medicare taskforce and said she believed the new policy direction would help close the gap. “I hope that we are about to see big positive changes for health funding in Australia,” she said.

Many in the sector are pointing to Victoria’s community health service model as one that could be adopted nationwide. The community health services have been delivering team-based care for 50 years, including health promotions, chronic illness and disease prevention and treatment, mental health services, oral health, allied health, general practice and community outreach.