‘Fight like hell’: Tailem Bend faces a battle to keep its GP clinic
Here’s what you can do to help.
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Tailem Bend residents may have to “fight like hell” to keep their community’s GP service open, the district’s acting mayor has warned.
About 100 anxious locals met at Tailem Bend Town Hall on Tuesday night to hear from the council and health authorities about what is being done to save their GP clinic, whose current owners plan to close it in October.
The owners of the Murraylands Medical Centre were not represented at the meeting.
Health advisory committee chair Julie Barrie said the community had experienced “quite devastating depths of despair and distress” since the clinic’s announcement last month.
Riverland Mallee Coorong Local Health Network chief executive Wayne Champion said he had since been scouring the region and the state, looking for a private operator who might be able to keep the service going.
Two of the three providers in Murray Bridge – Bridge Clinic and Murray Bridge Medical Centre – had said no.
The third, Bridgeview Family Practice, was part of the same group which was about to pull out of Tailem Bend.
Another local party had expressed an interest, but had been unable to provide the level of service required – they didn’t have GPs who were certified to work without supervision.
One more possibility was an organisation which operated several clinics elsewhere in rural South Australia; its board was due to consider the matter at a meeting on Thursday night.
If that failed?
The last-ditch option would be for the local health network itself to step in and provide a service.
The catch: it was prohibited by law from doing do, and would have to lobby Canberra for an exemption.
That process could take up to 18 months.
“We may have to cause a ruckus,” acting Mayor Jonathan Pietzsch told the crowd.
“We may have to fight, and fight goddamn hard.”
How would an exemption work?
The Riverland Mallee Coorong LHN already operates GP clinics at Karoonda, Lameroo and Pinnaroo, on the basis that no commercial operators were able to be found there.
The LHN would have to prove the same thing at Tailem Bend.
“Commonwealth legislation forbids us from providing Medicare GP services unless we get an exemption from the federal government,” Mr Champion said.
“We’re a provider of last resort.”
To get an exemption, the LHN had to file a form, which it had already done; the provider which was closing down had to provide a letter of support; then SA Health had to pass those documents on to Canberra through its intergovernmental relations unit.
When an audience member expressed disbelief that the process could take up to 18 months, he threw his hands up: “So do I.”
The bigger issue, he suggested, was a lack of GPs across regional Australia.
Not enough were being trained here to meet the nation’s needs; and those who trained in the cities tended to put down roots and stay there.
Fifty trainee doctors had started studying at a new Riverland Academy of General Practice, Mr Champion said, including 10 in the Murraylands; but none would be qualified soon enough to help Tailem Bend.
Perhaps the LHN and the Rural Doctors Workforce Agency needed to market Tailem Bend better; or perhaps the profession as a whole needed to stop seeing general practice as a lesser calling than specialist medicine at the big city hospitals.
The Coorong and two neighbouring councils had applied for federal funding to look at the wider health care issue across the Coorong, Limestone Coast and upper South East, Cr Pietzsch said.
Emergency, aged care and pathology services will continue
In the meantime, Mr Champion said, the LHN had contracted GPs to support the Tailem Bend hospital and its aged care facility – emergency patients and elderly residents would continue to be cared for.
SA Pathology would also stay open, and he encouraged local allied health providers to get in touch about continuing to operate out of the clinic, too.
Mr Champion acknowledged that the LHN had “messed up” its relationship with the Murraylands Medical Centre a year ago, when the centre’s GPs were evicted for failing to pay $150,000 worth of rent.
The clinic briefly closed, but reopened after former state Health Minister Chris Picton pushed the two parties towards a settlement.
However, Mr Champion said on Tuesday that – despite having their debts wiped and being offered a serious discount on their rent – the clinic had again chosen to leave town.
Even a deal which would have ensured a part-time GP service had been withdrawn, he said.
Locals express fear for the future
At least a dozen local residents took to the microphone at the meeting to express their concerns.
Without a GP clinic, how would the local chemist survive, and how could new residents be attracted to live and work at Tailem Bend?
“(If) we lose our chemist, we lose our doctors, we lose our identity,” Pauline Merritt said.
“If we’ve got to go to Murray Bridge, Karoonda or Coonalpyn to get a doctor’s opinion to save a person’s life, that person is going to be dead,” another audience member said.
While Mount Barker was getting a new hospital, the Coorong was being overlooked, Tammy Shepherd said.
Why had the clinic ever been charged rent at all, another audience member asked: “Why are we not just grateful to have a functioning practice?”
Another blamed “bureaucratic bungling, infighting and finger-pointing”.
Don Wood asked if the community could get by without a GP, perhaps with a nurse practitioner able to write prescriptions, but Cr Pietzsch said it was not negotiable: “The community needs a doctor.”
What can locals do to help?
Those at the meeting suggested several actions readers of this story might take:
- Write to the federal Health and Ageing Minister: That would be Mark Butler, the Member for Hindmarsh in west Adelaide; he will be responsible for granting any exemption that would allow the LHN to operate a GP clinic at Tailem Bend if no commercial provider can be found. Visit www.health.gov.au/contact-a-minister.
- Nominate for the Coorong Community Health Advancement and Advisory Committee: A position is vacant for one independent member of this council-run group, which will investigate and make recommendations about health services and care in the district. Send a one-page expression of interest, describing how your experience, knowledge and passion will help, to interim council CEO Myles Somers at council@coorong.sa.gov.au by 9am on September 16.
- Attend the Coorong Health Service Health Advisory Council’s AGM: This meeting will be held at Meningie Hospital at 6.30pm on October 14, the same day on which Tailem Bend’s clinic is scheduled to close. Up to eight community members are able to be on the board of this organisation, which exists to advise SA Health and others on the needs of the local community, and owns the building occupied by Tailem Bend’s GP clinic.
- Blockade the highway? That was what locals did when the state government threatened to close the hospital in 1988, Pauline Merritt told Murray Bridge News – they used trucks and tractors to block the highway through town for 24 hours, and got the outcome they wanted. And they could do it again if needed if it came to that, she warned.
The state Health Minister, Blair Boyer, is expected to spend a day at Tailem Bend in the near future, learning about the community’s needs.
No date for the visit has yet been set, but the Coorong council will promote it ahead of time.
“You have my reassurance that we are well and truly aware of the issue and are doing everything in our power to try to help the Tailem Bend community to make sure they have access to GP appointments into the future,” Mr Boyer said in parliament on Tuesday.
State MP Jason Virgo said he, too would be lobbying the federal minister for a speedy solution.
