THE permanent closure of Tristar Medical Clinic and the crisis it has caused requires urgent solutions, which are being negotiated. But the situation also calls for a sober analysis of how we got here in the first place, so we can avoid the same mistakes again.
For the best part of a decade, the Federal Coalition Government has performed poorly on rural healthcare.
It froze the Medicare rebates for five years, undermining the viability of GP clinics and the attractiveness of General Practice as a career.
New rules about supervisor ratios were changed to improve the quality of practice, but little to no effort was made to prepare for the inevitable service vacuum that would occur when bulk-billing clinics like Tristar became unviable.
So here we are.
In Mildura, the closure of Tristar has left at least 15,000 patients without a GP. When they need medical care, they will be fronting up to the hospital.
Which brings us to the Victorian Liberal and National parties. Because of them, Mildura’s hospital building was built for profit, not patients.
It was never big enough in the first place, let alone now, and thanks to the Federal Coalition’s handiwork, it’s about to be over-run.
The Liberal Party has promised us a new hospital, but they don’t really care about healthcare in Mildura.
We know that because they abandoned us for 20 years, as the Nationals stood by, mute and nodding at all the right times.
Since my election in 2018, we have been undoing that legacy. Slowly but surely.
We are on the cusp of achieving a trifecta that has not been achieved in a single term, at least to my knowledge.
That is, bringing a privatised hospital back to public management, securing $2 million for a masterplan for redevelopment, and securing the capital funding for that masterplan to be built. We are so close.
Momentum is on our side, but it could be quickly undone if we forget the lessons of history.
