The release of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report has re-ignited discussions about reform of Australia’s primary healthcare system. (more…)
The vehemence with which the medical profession opposes any moves on behalf of nurses and other health professionals to move legitimately into Primary Health Care in their own right is telling. A system in which some professional groups spend an inordinate amount of time propping up the work of another is not to be abandoned lightly. (more…)
The Medicare Review contains welcome aspirations, but the instruments to achieve them are poorly delineated. (more…)
Hardly a month goes by without a new media report (and here) of alleged scandalous conduct of some doctors who call themselves ‘cosmetic surgeons’ but who lack recognised specialised surgical training. These reports have tended to focus on the harm done to patients and generally failed to explain to the public how and why the situation has arisen. While some commentators have blamed the medical profession for failing to regulate itself, this is far from the reality. (more…)
Three years into the Covid -19 pandemic the many weaknesses and disconnections within the jurisdictional decision-making arrangements are clear. These fault lines significantly impair our national capacity to reliably detect and respond to this ongoing outbreak in a timely, effective and efficient manner. We urgently need to develop integrated national and international responses to disease prevention and control, particularly pandemic planning and management capacity. (more…)
The recommendations of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce released last week, like almost any serious health reform in Australia, require joint Commonwealth and state action. (more…)
As we start a new year, it is a good time to reflect on the lessons of 2022 – not just from the Covid pandemic but also the floods that wreaked havoc on communities all down the east coast of Australia. (more…)
As I watched the Four Corners program, Vape Haze, in 2022, I was struck by the program’s focus on addiction, a bad thing. A mother spoke of her devastation when her 16-year-old daughter told her she was vaping. (more…)
In Australia, we pride ourselves on our egalitarianism, yet now cannot even provide security of accommodation for everyone. How can this be, when older women who have lost their financial security from family break-up and illness, and even young women with small children, end up couch-surfing or sleeping in a car? (more…)
Australia’s position as America-lite, a little sibling stumbling along the line between voracious neoliberalism and violent abnegation of its own history, comes into distinct relief every so often. (more…)
To suggest that China and only China needs to provide negative COVID-19 tests, tests on arrival or even a complete ban of arrivals from China is a political and racist approach to a global health problem. (more…)
State and territory first ministers are again pressing national cabinet to consider health care reform as its top priority at the first meeting for 2023. We have heard this song before. (more…)
When it was established in 1974, Medicare funded the way health services were delivered at that time. That delivery system has not been changed much at all since then. After fifty years the way we deliver health care needs substantial reform and updating. Our health delivery system is in a mess. (more…)
Why do we have a problem in recruiting General Practitioners and how can we overcome the shortage? The answer – to quote Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister in the Post World War II Labour Government: ‘By stuffing their mouth with Gold’. (more…)
I wish to write here in a frank and open way about the way the progression of Friedreich’s Ataxia (FA) has severely impacted the proceedings of everyday life, I am now 60 years old and the progression is well advanced. I am writing from the standpoint of what those in my profession of sociology would say is “participant observation.” (more…)
The Chinese government refined its COVID-19 prevention and control measures recently, ushering in a new phase of the country’s efforts to prevent and control the disease. The refined measures are in line with people’s wishes, conducive to China’s economic and social development and world economic recovery, and will inject more stability and positive energy into today’s volatile world.
I would progressively wind back and eliminate the $14b pa taxpayer subsidy for Private Health Insurance and use that very large sum to fund the inclusion of dental care within Medicare and increase the funding to the states for expanded specialist services in outpatient clinics at public hospitals. (more…)
There is much hoo-ha following the government’s decision to revert to 10 subsidised psychology sessions from the pandemic-fuelled 20 sessions in place for the last couple of years. (more…)
Proposals to reform how Medicare supports primary care need to take account of the changed ownership structure of general practice as well as changing health needs. (more…)
In our third year of the pandemic while the government sends out bland statements, Covid-19 has not gone away. (more…)
Australia has no national policy to prevent the rising death toll in heatwaves. The provision of insulated and air conditioned housing in many remote communities will take years. In the meantime heat shelters must be urgently provided. (more…)
Medicare must now focus on how health services are delivered.
When it was established in 1974, Medicare funded the way health services were delivered at that time. That delivery system has not been changed much at all since then. After fifty years the way we deliver health care needs substantial reform and updating. Our health delivery system is in a mess. (more…)
‘… he just keeps rolling along’, destroying homes, communities, health and farming. (more…)
We are assured by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the G20, and their friends that pandemics pose an existential threat to our survival and well-being. Pandemics are becoming more common, and if we don’t move urgently we will have ourselves to blame for more mass death of the ‘next pandemic.’ (more…)
Our health services should be first and foremost about patients, and a revamped Medicare should be focused primarily on patient need, not on the antiquated view of some providers as to how a 21st century health system should be. (more…)
On a bleak Melbourne midwinter night in 1967, Medicare was conceived. The election of the Whitlam Government on December 2 ,1972 gave impetus to what was to come. Medicare was finally launched in 1975. (more…)
While a lot of attention has been given to the unprecedented protests in China about the “dynamic zero COVID” policy, not much has been written about the wider political context, and particularly the young people leading the protests. (more…)
Why shouldn’t my participation in the development of (disability) social policy through academic research and writing – voluntary or not – be viewed as a substantial contribution to Australia? I do not understand “mutual obligation” in the individualistic way that government and neo-liberal social policy interprets it. (more…)
The national medical regulator, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), is responsible for the oversight of fifteen different groups of health professionals, covering a total of 825,700 practitioners. AHPRA has become a huge and well-resourced bureaucracy which now has the capacity to ‘pull the wool over the eyes’ of distant and poorly-briefed health ministers whose accountability for the regulator is remote. (more…)
On December 2 we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government. Health reform was one of that government’s signature achievements. It appears that the stars are now aligning to build on Whitlam’s remarkable legacy and create a new Medicare fit for purpose in the 21st century. (more…)