Like almost any serious health reform in Australia, the recommendations of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report, released last week, require joint Commonwealth and state action.
Unfortunately, state responses ahead of the national cabinet meeting were relatively juvenile – the Commonwealth should give them and doctors more money – with no serious commitment to work together for reform.
The noises coming out of the meeting were much better, with actions and negotiations scheduled over the next couple of months before the federal budget in May.
However, the track record of Commonwealth-state processes over the past decade has been long on gobbledygook and short on anything that has demonstrable benefit for patients or taxpayers.
It is as if the point of all the negotiations was to get a signed agreement, without caring whether any reform was actually achieved.
This has to change.
Health Minister Mark Butler has said that Medicare is in its worst shape in 40 years, so at least he is up for action.
But primary care is not the only area where reform discussions are under way.
There are critical shortages of health professionals in many areas, and public hospitals are under stress.
Joint Commonwealth-state action is required in all three domains.
1. Primary care reform
A centrepiece of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report was an emphasis on integrated, multi-disciplinary teams.
The Commonwealth must get funding incentives right for these to work.
But that is not enough.
The states control many of the regulatory levers about who, other than medical practitioners, can prescribe which medications.
Prescribing rights for pharmacists, nurses, and nurse practitioners are regulated by states through scheduling of drugs.
At present each state is going its own merry way on this, leaving the Commonwealth playing catch up.
However, the Commonwealth pays for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and so state and Commonwealth decisions must be harmonised.
2. Workforce planning
University and vocational education places are paid in part by the Commonwealth and in part by students themselves, facilitated by deferral of fees through income-contingent loans.
Especially in the health professions, a rate-limiting factor for the number of new health professionals is the number of clinical placements in health and community facilities.
These are currently partially subsidised by the Commonwealth, but state governments, especially through public hospitals, provide majority funding here.
Rational health workforce planning was set back by the decision in the 2014 Abbott budget – with Peter Dutton as health minister – to abolish the national workforce planning agency, Health Workforce Australia.
Planning the right mix of health professionals, and implementing the plans, again requires joint Commonwealth-state action.
Action here is urgent given the long lead times involved in the education and training of health professionals.
3. Hospital reform
Always high on the agenda for any health system reform is getting hospital policies right.
Public hospitals are under immense pressure, partly because of the continuing ravages of COVID-19 and the incidence of new infections, partly because of deferred care and long COVID, and partly because there were problems in many states pre-COVID.
The states have suggested the answer is just to give them more money, specifically for the Commonwealth to increase its share of public hospital funding from 45 per cent to 50 per cent.
Unfortunately, there has yet been no commitment from the states about what the Australian taxpayer and patients get in return for billions of extra spend. Nothing about what will happen to either elective procedures or emergency wait times.
Nor is there any commitment to address inefficiency in hospital care. Here again, joint Commonwealth-state commitment for reform is needed.
The vibes from last week’s national cabinet meeting appears to be that the Commonwealth and states recognised they have to work together on reform. One hopes that they also accept a sense of urgency for this task.
One also hopes that by ‘reform’, we don’t mean yet another policy document produced from the random policy word generator stored in a basement in Woden, but rather what is produced is a document, written in plain English with verbs (‘doing words’), targets, and timelines, and funding to effect change.
In the long term, Commonwealth-state reform might require the use of new structures, especially joint action at the regional level through primary health networks and local health districts.
But whatever the structures, we need to move away from high-level, vague commitments, which satisfy no one outside those in the cosy process and which do not lead to any real change, only satisfying the requirement for a photo opportunity with signatures on a piece of paper.
Stephen Duckett, an economist, is an Honorary Enterprise Professor in General Practice and in Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne, chair of the board of Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network, and a member of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce.
This article was originally published in Pearls and Irritations.
