IT is a $620 million telehealth system, introduced by Labor in a bid to solve the rural health crisis, paying specialists to hold video consultations with patients.
But it is failing to deliver.
The Department of Health’s annual report in 2012-13 shows just one-fifth of the annual budget for the scheme was spent.
And only 12 per cent of the nation’s specialists were taking part in the scheme, which was meant to remove the distance barrier to health care.
Doctors were initially given $6000 taxpayer-funded incentives to equip their surgeries to provide services via video conferencing.
A surge in demand for the incentives in the first year of the scheme’s operation blew the spending out from a budgeted $12.3 million to $17.6 million in the year to June 2012.
But those doctors who got the equipment went on the deliver only an average five services each.
The rules for the scheme were subsequently tightened so the bulk of the incentives came after 10 consultations were delivered.
The Rural Health Alliance says problems accessing fast internet speeds in the bush are a major issue for the program and could be one reason for the under-usage.
The government set a goal of 495,000 telehealth consultations by July 2015.
However, the scheme helped only 40,000 patients and delivered only 71,000 services in 2012-13.
The department says the number of telehealth services and the number of doctors providing telehealth services have continued to increase.
“It was not expected that all specialists would provide telehealth services. The original target for take-up in the 2014-15 year was 10 per cent of specialists,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Health said.
As at the end of March 2014 the Department of Human Services had processed over 169,000 telehealth services provided to over 62,000 patients by over 9,700 practitioners.
More than 220 residential aged care facilities had provided telehealth services, the spokeswoman said.
The scheme was the centrepiece of Julia Gillard’s election campaign launch in 2010.
She promised the program would “transform” health care in the bush by allowing rural people to consult their doctors over the internet.
It comes as Rural Doctors Association president Dr Ian Kamerman says the May Budget will make matters worse for the bush because it has “multiple arrows hitting the same target — GPs”.
When medical courses triple in cost, graduates won’t work in the bush because they won’t earn enough to pay off their debt, he says.
Low-income country patients will find it harder to pay the $7 GP fee and other changes will make it less attractive to take on GP registrars in the bush.
Rural Health Alliance’s Gordon Gregory says it is time to move away from the fee for service model for practices in more remote rural areas and pay doctors that work there a salary.
This model is used in Queensland with doctors receiving a salary from the state government but also given the right to practise privately to earn extra income.
A Grattan Institute report last year said the solution to the crisis was to allow pharmacists in the bush to write repeat prescriptions for a drug the doctor had already prescribed and to deliver vaccinations.
It also suggests producing an army of three-year trained physician assistants who, working under a GP, could order blood tests plus X-rays and write prescriptions to ease the rural workforce shortage.
Source: News.com.au