LAST week’s visit by Health Minister Cameron Dick to the central west appears to have cemented a productive relationship between government and the Central West Hospital and Health Service board, begun under the previous government.
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As well as announcing a state of the art CT scanner will be installed in the hospital at Longreach from mid-2016 and gifting the former Isisford hospital building to the Whitman’s Memorial Park and Museum Association, Mr Dick met with the regional drought health committee and announced “if you listen to locals, you can’t go wrong”.
The committee has established a working model of cooperation across a number of services delivering mental health and wellbeing programs to the drought-stricken region, and it made a formal submission to Mr Dick on ways it thought services could be delivered more effectively across the state.
Mr Dick said it had been very powerful to listen to.
“I will be discussing it with my cabinet colleagues. We want the most effective use of resources, and the challenge is to make systems work better across departments,” he said.
“People don’t care how they get the service, so long as they get it.”
CWHHS chairman Ed Warren described the visit as a valuable one for the minister, enabling him to understand their points of difference to metropolitan health services.
“People out here have the opportunity to ‘own’ their health service,” he said.
Tenders for a co-located health and emergency services facility in Alpha are proceeding and it’s expected this will be in place by February 2016.
This may be where the pleasantries cease, thanks to federal budget cuts to health, expected to take effect from 2017.
Mr Dick used the opportunity last week to point out that cuts would make it harder to deliver local services.
“Mapping the impact of those, they would have funded 8000 new staff,” he said. “The challenge is how to continue our service in a tightened fiscal environment.
“I will be taking up the fight for places like Isisford, Barcaldine and Blackall.”
The opposition has warned of possible moves to redirect rural funding to larger provincial hospitals, and has called on the government to provide birthing services at Charters Towers, Yarrabah, Mossman and Cloncurry by the end of its term.
The Newman government reopened rural maternity services at Beaudesert and Cooktown, since resulting in over 200 births at Beaudesert, and parliament passed a motion endorsing the strategy in recent days.
Mr Warren said his board was looking for solutions other than reducing services.
He emphasised the value in having services such as the CT scanner sited in the central west in being able to save on travel and retrieval costs.
“Other specialist services will be able to be introduced here as a consequence of this now,” he said.
The $3.5 million scanner is expected to benefit around 50 patients a month and Mr Dick said doctors would have the ability to undertake some complex surgical procedures that would otherwise not be done.
“This dovetails well into Central West Health’s recent agreement with the Department of Health’s Central Integrated Regional Cancer Service to support cancer patients with telehealth and locally administered chemotherapy,” he said.
The scanner will be operated by medical imaging services contractor Alpenglow Australia P/L.
