The Australian Medical Association has called for an independent inquiry into Tasmania’s health system, saying it remains in “a state of perpetual crisis” despite repeated reviews.
Australian Medical Association Tasmania president Meg Creely said the system’s problems were not limited to one clinic, one hospital or one region.
“We want to know why, after so many reviews, after so much money, after so many good people working extraordinarily hard to fix our health system, why are we still in a state of perpetual crisis?” she said.
She said the problems were connected, with emergency department blockages linked to subacute beds and ambulance ramping linked to the workforce.
“We have to stop looking at them as one problem at a time,” she said.
Creely said the inquiry should take no more than two years and work such as the electronic medical record should continue alongside it.
She said the association wanted the inquiry to cover the services Tasmania funds and controls, not federally funded general practice and aged care.
She said a state inquiry could not compel federal departments to give evidence, but could still examine how the state system interacted with those services.
Creely said the Legislative Council’s current inquiry into the Department of Health had raised “really important aspects” of the system and its evidence should inform the new inquiry.
She said an independent inquiry would bring in expertise in areas such as clinical governance and health economics and would remove “some of the politics”.
She said the state spent $10 million a day on health and the last commission of inquiry had cost less than three days of current health spending.
Royal Hobart Hospital acting emergency department director Byron Booth said elderly patients who could not return home and had no nursing home place were spending “far too long” in the emergency department.
“When the whole of the system is at crisis and it is overflowing, where do you see that overflow? You see it in the emergency department,” he said.
Booth said there was “almost certainly a need” for urgent care centres and virtual emergency departments, but they would not fix overcrowding.
He said Tasmania would need a new greenfield hospital “at some point”.
AMA Tasmania vice president Jerome Muir-Wilson said the association wanted the inquiry to consider a single funder of health in Tasmania, with “one accountability and one bucket of funding”.
AMA Tasmania immediate past president Michael Lumsden-Steel said the inquiry should set out the state’s infrastructure needs, which he said the association wanted delivered within 10 to 12 years.
Creely said the association had raised the idea with Health Minister Bridget Archer and that the minister was, in general, “open to conversations”.
Government minister Nick Duigan, asked about the proposal at an unrelated announcement in Launceston, said he did not think a commission of inquiry would help deliver a clear plan for a sustainable health system.
“Another commission of inquiry potentially takes years. It takes tens of millions of dollars of investment and doesn’t help a single patient on the way through,” he said.
Duigan said he believed the association had been saying “as recently as a week ago” that no more reviews were needed, only action.
He said the government was investing “at record levels” in health.
He said he had been advised the health minister had been in discussions with the association about the proposal last night.
Labor MP Jen Butler said there was “merit” in an independent review of the health system.
Asked whether Labor would back a commission of inquiry, she said that was a matter for the party’s health spokesperson.
She said any review should have “a wide scope” that took in federal as well as state funding.
