Photo: The Hon. Walt Secord, Shadow Treasurer ( a member of the current rural health inquiry parliamentary committee), Ms Tara Moriarty, Shadow Minister for Mental Health and Yass Valley Times Editor Jasmin Jones. The Legislative Council representatives were pictured in Yass during a previous visit to accept a business case plan for expanded health services in Yass Valley from Jasmin who is also a mother of five, representing the New Yass Hospital with Maternity Working Group.
Shifting the cost of health to the ACT – at what price?
NSW to ACT payments for outsourcing health services will soon reach 100 million of our tax dollars.
Yass Valley is one of the cross-border communities surrounding the ACT; so, it makes perfect sense to our residents for the NSW government to pitch in to fund high-end tertiary care. It also works neatly for non-emergency services such as mammograms for example, when more than half of our workforce is across the border for all the working day.
However, at what cost is this deal short-changing us on services better provided closer to home, which would increase the capacity and viability of surrounding rural and regional hospitals including Yass Hospital?
Oncology treatment chairs, dialysis, ultrasounds, ear-nose-throat surgery and maternity are just some of the services residents have repeatedly raised as options to provide locally.
All the while, cross border payments to the ACT have jumped 25-million dollars over five years, and there has been a recent cost overrun of 20 million dollars by the Southern NSW Local Health District for failing to justify the Activity Based Funding requirements demanded by the Federal Government.
What if some of that money was pulled back and spent on local services? Increasing the capacity of cross border rural and regional hospital operational and administrative teams would give them a distinct advantage in reducing bleed from the district’s budget to the ACT for services. It would also give them a greater organisational capacity to document all assistance given to each patient to have some chance of reaping the maximum federal dollar contribution.
Does the fly-in-fly-out doctor brought in to cover shifts at rural hospitals at tremendous cost understand the reporting system at each different hospital; enough to document patient services rendered to the last detail for these hospitals to collect the Federal Funding contribution? How do these rural hospitals compare with metropolitan hospitals with regular staff and a comparable army of administrators?
As rural taxpayers, we have a right to ask these questions. Are we getting value for money from NSW Health, the Federal Government and the ACT health system we visit?
It’s time we had an honest to goodness health check-up Yass Valley.
I encourage readers to make a submission to the Rural Health Parliamentary Inquiry before December 13. You can find the link in our matching website story – Yass Valley Residents can have their say in the rural parliamentary inquiry and here – Rural Health Inquiry.
