The passing of legislation during the last sitting days in June to establish a new National Rural Health Commissioner is a significant step forward toward achieving a more equitable healthcare service nationally. A new champion for rural patients, the role offers a new opportunity to ensure our collective voice is heard bringing to focus the important work we do. Through this key role, rural patients finally get the focus they deserve and we know that lasting change will require a broad policy lens encompassing all disciplines. Those working in rural Australia know that it takes a dedicated team and an enduring local commitment to tackling the many challenges in delivering regional, rural and remote healthcare. A focus on the full multidisciplinary team is key to providing more integrated and improved patient-care strategies. Strategies which work to address access constraints in the context of diminished rural resources require supportive policy to enable integration. It is in developing these service solutions, through policy advancement, to support viable rural models of care that we can work together to address disparities. One of the first tasks for the new Commissioner will be to work with stakeholders to develop a National Rural Generalist Pathway. In maximising workforce outcomes, the ‘generalist’ role has long been the basis of rural medical practice enabling strong patient reach across settings to address access constraints. It is clear that rural GPs in utilising their broad scope to provide services across the continuum of care in a range of settings have always offered, and remain, a key solution to addressing rural patient need. But we are not working alone and this same level of focus is warranted across all disciplines to work to the level of service integration required. It’s reassuring that a much broader remit is envisaged by Dr Gillespie for the new Commissioner role. We all understand that addressing workforce and services issues to provide more effective, comprehensive healthcare is much broader than medicine. A focus encompassing nursing, dental health, Indigenous health, mental health, midwifery and allied health alongside medicine is required. The patient must also be given a strong voice and reaching out to the health consumer through collaborative community-led engagement will be important. To realise strong reform, a needs-based approach which can allow for flexibility is required. But it’s a hard sell. A community-led model or approach doesn’t always fit current funding models and our system does not always allow for the required integration. It is by working through the service mix required, both private and public, which are specific to local need and achievable against available resources, that communities can find the solutions they need. Removing barriers to enable multidisciplinary healthcare teams to deliver comprehensive patient care across rural settings is key to making this work. How to address increasing local demand for palliative care services, for example, needs a significant local commitment and many disciplines to make this happen. Working through to address poor service integration such as fragmentation which can sometimes occur due to policy barriers which limit the participation of allied health in aged and community care is another key example. We know what’s needed and what works well in rural. We’ve had years of review and it’s time to implement. Lasting change can only be realised through enabling more community-initiated solutions, adding flexibility to enable service integration. Finding local solutions in addressing need takes local leadership and time for critical planning which often needs to occur outside of practice hours. Support for this type of action can and will lead to improved skill utilisation and solutions which can work. It really takes a whole community - involvement by all sectors of the health community – to drive this level of change. In my own town of Wagga Wagga we certainly strive toward this level of engagement but in implementing new solutions our collective voice is not always loud enough. There is renewed hope that the new National Rural Health Commissioner can help us raise the volume enough for our community-led action to lead to change. [Ayman Shenouda]
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A big part of securing the next generation of rural GPs is around ensuring there remains a positive focus on general practice.
Rural practice is challenging which in turn makes it very rewarding, enabling you to develop a breadth of skills to build resilience in addressing need. Providing that insight for future doctors in a supportive way during those early learning years is so vitally important. Sitting with a registrar recently, I was surprised to learn that he considered himself a rural generalist, and not a rural GP. This is despite the fact that he was training to a curriculum which is general practice: the endpoint in training for a rural generalist is of course a general practice Fellowship. Let’s be very clear: rural generalists are rural GPs. General practitioners are generalists by definition. The term ‘rural generalist’ describes a rural general practitioner working to the full scope of their practice with skill sets that are informed by the needs of the community they serve. These skill sets may encompass both advanced procedural and non-procedural skills working across primary and secondary care contexts with an emphasis on emergency medicine. It’s about ensuring the right skill mix against demand. The Federal Assistant Minister for Health, Dr David Gillespie MP, certainly knows this requirement well and his own definition is fitting: “A rural generalist is a doctor who’s trained as a general practitioner but has extra skills so that they can operate in a hospital setting as well as a community setting. That involves not just being a jack of all trades, but being a well-qualified doctor who can cope with the extra problems, clinical, public health, and hospital skills that you need to look after a regional town.”[1] It is the context that matters most and is key to getting health rural workforce policy right. The general (core) and advanced (specific) skills required in addressing patient need depend on the health needs and context of the community. That is why it is important we align training investment to service need. In developing a rural generalist pathway nationally, this, therefore, must also be broad. We need a national pathway that equips general practitioners with a full range of competencies enabling them to deliver patient care closer to home in the primary and secondary care contexts. We know that developing skills around the ongoing care considerations are the areas that best serve the community. We also know that dedicated and clear pathways for rural GPs to acquire advanced skills and utilise them in a way that is valued and recognised are important workforce factors. Supportive strategies like these are vital in attracting and retaining a skilled rural workforce that is responsive to need. Most of all it’s about valuing the contribution to the healthcare system of quality general practice and its essential and enduring role in supporting rural communities. [1] Gillespie transcript. 29 March 2017. RDAA Poli Breakfast. Dr David Gillespie MP Federal Assistant Minister for Health. Canberra. |
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