Australia’s health system is facing enormous pressures not only in the waves of new COVID-19 variants but also in rebuilding its capacity from those months of the pandemic.
Stephen Duckett, honorary enterprise professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice, was highly critical of the past government’s handling of the pandemic, calling it “abysmal”.
Duckett is also a former health secretary, and was previously at the Grattan Institute as its health program director.
“The number of cases just went through the roof, the number of hospitalisations went through the roof, the number of deaths went through the roof, all of which put immense pressure on hospitals, hospital staff kept on getting sick with COVID put more pressure on the remaining staff,” Duckett told The Mandarin.
“We’re in a serious situation now, it is possible that the COVID wave has peaked. If you just sit tight for a little bit longer, things might resolve themselves, but then you’ve got a whole lot of accumulated leave that has to be addressed. We’re not in good shape.”
A decline in the number of doctors bulk billing has been widely reported in the media. Health reported 700,000 fewer general practitioners bulk billing in the June 2022 quarter compared to the December 2021 quarter, from 88.6% to 87.1%.
Duckett told The Mandarin the figures have yet to reveal a “dramatic decline” in the number of GPs bulk-billing. However, he noted general practice is becoming less attractive as the income for other areas of medicine, specifically procedural specialties, goes up.
When asked what the public service could do to help the issue, the former health secretary offered a possible solution: workforce planning.
“We’ve got to actually get workforce planning working again in the country. Whether the right answer in 2022 is to reestablish the agency, or whether you need to beef up the capacity in the Department of Health or some other strategy, I don’t know,” the academic said.
“But I do know that the collapse of workforce planning has been associated with the abolition of the agency.”
In 2014, then-health minister Peter Dutton announced in the federal budget several sweeping changes to federal health agencies, with Health Workforce Australia abolished on 8 October 2014 and its duties absorbed by the Department of Health.
“In my view, the people to be held to account in the national government’s abysmal performance in managing its areas of responsibility is the government, not the public service,” Duckett commented.
While scathing of the previous government’s pandemic response, Duckett added he was “cautiously optimistic” about the Albanese government.
“They’ve started to do the right sorts of things,” the academic said.
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Australia’s COVID-19 response victim to federal operational failures, former secretary says
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