GPS let down
General Practitioners have completed extensive post medical school training including high stakes exams to become fellows of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). They, like us, are specialists. Their specialty skills are in primary care, assessing, diagnosing the wide undifferentiated presentations that befall all people. Primary care will always be the backbone of our health care system and we need this recognition urgently in Australia. The most indispensable health care professionals in our lives are our individual GPS.
From decades before through to and beyond Covid, General Practitioners have been failed by
systemic policy decisions and become the punching bag for mainstream media and social media posters who feel they know more.
Freezing of Medicare rebates (government’s contribution to the pts health costs not the agreed payment for a doctor’s service) has been exhausted. Practitioners / practices can no longer absorb the costs. Yet on most 15 minute intervals a GP is forced to negotiate their income for their professional expertise with a request for bulk billing. When was the last time you asked your hairdresser to throw in the foils, your cafe to give you coffee at cost, your tradie to throw in the materials, or your lawyer not to bill you? Never?
During Covid GPS were asked to fund their own personal protective equipment whilst hospital staff had it supplied, told they were not frontline for vaccinations (phase B) whilst being requested to see symptomatic pts and relied on for > 50% of vaccination rollout.
Now some media lay the blame for Medicare waste broadly at GPS feet with unsubstantiated, non evidenced based claims by a “Medicare expert” with a conflict of interest following their thesis. The 8 billion (30%) claim has been debunked and is entirely baseless. Reporting ignores past and present systematic accepted waste. No context is provided to the complexity of the Medicare item numbers that dictate what can be claimed and when with the inherent compliance risk responsibility solely the practitioners. Experiencing a day in a GPS work would provide understanding and context before one publishes the next click bait
story. A more noble endeavour would be to educate readers and advocate for meaningful health system reforms including formal shared care models which Townsville is ideally suited to. No wonder only 15% of medical graduates currently choose to specialise in General Practice compared to 50% approximately 15yrs ago. If this is not corrected, the difficulties seeing a GP will only be worse and the viability of our health system will be jeopardised. All issues currently in health care, ambulance ramping, increasing ED presentations, surgical wait lists, hospitalisation for chronic illness stabilisation are directly contributed to by inability of people being able to access and benefit from high quality primary care.
We, non GP specialists, without reservation support our primary care specialists and advocate for greater respect for this critical component of healthcare and necessary system reform including required funding to allow GP to once again flourish for the benefit of us all now and into the future.
Dr Shane Anderson, Dr Sugeet Baveja, Dr Craig Costello, Dr Deanne Crosbie, Dr Rahul Dua, Dr Stephen Fairley, Dr Jay Iyer, Dr Sonia Iyer, Dr Deepak Jain, Dr Abhishek Joshi, Dr Angeline Khoo, Dr Gillian Mahy, Dr Vijay Menon, Dr Ed Morris, Dr Soniah Moloi, Dr Parul Nigam, Dr Amit Nigam, Dr Zulfiquer Otty, Dr Ben Rahmel, Dr Swetha Rangaswamaiah, Prof Ajay Rane PSM OAM, Dr Corinne Ryan, Prof Sabe Sabesan, Dr Vasant Shenoy, Dr Navdeep Singh, Dr Suresh Varma, Dr Christine Welch, Dr Joel Wight, Dr Phil Wolanski, Dr Raibhan Yadav