Riverina GP shares concerns as pressure on emergency departments increase

Finley GP and Murrumbidgee Local Health District director of primary care Alam Yoosuff said the district's hospital emergency departments are now delivering primary care by default. He appeared as a witness before the Special Commission of Inquiry into Healthcare Funding at the Wagga Courthouse on Thursday, March 21.

"Our emergency departments have already become the default place for primary care," Dr Yoosuff said.

He said the proportion of the population presenting to emergency departments in the MLHD was 1.5 times that of Sydney.

"We have to recognise this is a problem and it's going to (get worse)," he said.

Addressing the issues posed by a lack of GPs across the Riverina, Dr Yoosuff was asked whether it would be cost effective for the state to set up its own GP-like practices to deliver primary care.

He said the MLHD wouldn't set up a general practice inside a hospital's emergency department and explained how the problem worsens.

"If there is no doctor in a town, eventually patients will travel far away, and if they can't (do that) they will present at a hospital's emergency department," Dr Yoosuff said.

"My prediction is in the time to come we will have more trouble than we already have."

Dr Yoosuff said the delivery of primary health care through hospitals' emergency departments was inefficient, but argued that it would be more "costly" if the state was to set up its own GP-style primary healthcare practices.

Dr Yoosuff also raised concerns that highly experienced nurses are being drawn away to the private sector.

He said a lot of nurses in his part of the MLHD are being drawn towards agency work instead owing to the better pay.

This was negatively impacting the workforce because those leaving included "senior nursing colleagues... (and) supervisors".

Dr Yoosuff said efforts to help fix this problem might include standardising prices, blocking where local health districts could compete with each other on pricing.