“Our highly educated and trusted nurses and midwives in particular can play a much bigger role in primary care,” Butler said. The minister said he wanted to see complex regulations, funding systems and state and territory “silos” eliminated to make better use of the nursing workforce. And funding to support the return of 500 enrolled and registered nurses who had left the health system. Next week’s Budget will include funding for up to 6,000 nursing students to do clinical placements in primary care services nationwide. “Providers will get access to new funding packages, and new information about their regular patients so that they can provide more tailored care to those patients,” he added of the voluntary scheme.īutler said the critical national importance of the health workforce came into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the third foundational focus would be growing and supporting this group. “GPs can register with My Medicare so that patients can register with their preferred GP at that practice - over time, it will also be extended to nurse practitioners and other primary care providers. “The time has come to find new funding models that supplement ‘fee for service’ and it begins with the launch of My Medicare,” Butler said of a plan to forge stronger relationships between patients and healthcare teams, as well as longer Medicare-funded telehealth consultations. The idea was that more effective treatment of complex needs, there would be fewer repeat hospital admissions for a single person in any given year, and GPs would be given “incentive payments” to deliver tailored programs to keep these patients out of hospital. This would pave the way for more “blended funding models”, he said, and allow the healthcare system to better respond to community needs. In areas with more challenging recruitment issues, the minister said money would be given to primary health networks to fund allied health professionals such as social workers, physiotherapists, diabetes experts, and mental health practitioners. The government plans to address the problem by offering a “big increase” to the workforce incentive payment which GPs use to hire professionals such as practice nurses to join their team. Which means, primary care providers need support and investment to engage a broad range of health professionals to provide that more comprehensive care,” Butler said.
“This includes GPs, allied health, nurses, specialists and everything in between. “Right now only one in 10 specialists use My Health Record just one in five diagnostic reports in radiology are uploaded - the other four just disappear into the digital ether,” Butler said. “We simply cannot build a better Medicare without realising the opportunities that digital health technologies open up for more efficient and collaborative health care.
This should support the uploading of every patients’ pathology tests and diagnostic scan results to the government system. This would see more money from the Budget flow to investments in updating the “old technology” underpinning the My Health Record platform, and making the Digital Health Agency an ongoing entity.Ī total of $950 million would specifically go toward digital health initiatives to capture efficiency opportunities and more collaborative pathways to providing care, the minister said. The health minister announced on Tuesday the three strains of focus for looming Medicare reforms. The lifetime of an average Australian is nine years longer today than it was in 1984, but according to Mark Butler, the current universal healthcare system is now unable to deal with people’s increasingly “chronic and complex conditions”.
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