AMA President, Dr Rosanna Capolingua, said today that the latest report on GP activity from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) confirms without doubt that GPs are the lynchpins of quality primary health care in the Australian community.
Conducted by the Bettering the Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) program, the national survey of 100,000 GP encounters reported that there were more than 100 million items of patient service delivered by Australia’s GPs in 2006-07.
Dr Capolingua said the report backs the AMA’s recent call for greater Government support for our dedicated and hardworking GP workforce.
“When Australians get sick they want to see their local GP,” Dr Capolingua said.
“GPs are uniquely skilled to provide holistic care for patients. “Australians deserve to continue to receive quality health care from General Practice. Instead, we are seeing more and more attempts to promote lesser-trained and lesser-skilled substitutes for GPs.
“We have to put an end to this health policy laziness.
“All Australian governments must commit to providing incentives and better training opportunities to attract more local medical students into General Practice and to keep our ageing GP population in the workforce longer to train the next generation of GPs.
“With the Australian Health Care Agreements (AHCAs) being finalised this year and COAG meetings of all Labor governments, there has been no better opportunity for some time to achieve responsible forward-looking national health solutions.
