The Royal Australian College of GPs (RACGP) has welcomed the Victorian Government's significant investment in hospitals, but warned Victorians' access to quality care is far from guaranteed.
While the College said an extra $9.3 billion will boost care by opening new facilities and preventing hospital budgets from falling into deficit, it reiterated concerns that by deferring to lobbyists on pharmacy prescribing, the government is pursuing an approach that breaks continuity of care and increases risks to patients.
The RACGP also urged the government to monitor access to GPs and consider investments to ensure communities can access care.
RACGP Victoria chair Dr Anita Muñoz said the investment will help secure access to care and reiterated the importance of a well-connected health system but reiterated the essential role of general practice in an efficient health system.
"As GPs, we need to know that when we refer a patient to a hospital for non-GP specialist care, they'll get it," she said.
"Specialist GPs keep hospital costs down by providing preventive care so patients can stay healthy in the community. Supporting GPs to provide acute and chronic disease care to their full scope is the best way to prevent hospital cost blowouts. This investment will however help reassure GPs and our patients their access to care is secured.
"Investments in hospital systems are also an opportunity to ensure they are communicating well with patients' GPs. Research has also shown visiting a GP soon after an unplanned admission can reduce readmissions by up to 32%.
"As the Victorian coroner has stressed, ensuring GPs promptly receive discharge summaries with all relevant information when one of their patients leaves a hospital saves lives, particularly on medicines they have been prescribed.
"Health systems need clear lines of communication. It's a matter of safety. That also makes today's announcement pharmacy prescribing powers would be expanded troubling, as this too often fragments healthcare by breaking those lines of communication."
Dr Muñoz also noted the Victorian GP training incentives program, which she called 'a lesson for other states', will not continue despite strong and measurable improvements to rural, regional, and urban communities' access to care.
"While the federal funding will continue what Victoria started, it's unfortunate Victorian funding has ceased given how well the program was working to bring GPs to the communities which needed them most," she said.
"Three fifths of the junior doctors who received an incentive trained in regional or rural Victoria, one in eight recipients moved here in response, and almost half said they wouldn't have chosen to train as a GP at all without this funding.
"While the returned Albanese Government's commitment to invest in similar incentives to ensure doctors who train as GPs are not worse off than their hospital-based peers will back up the Victorian Government's pioneering investment over 2023 and 2024, the program showed investments in general practice deliver value for money with real effects.
"If a town doesn't have a GP close by, older people leave and young families are understandably reluctant to move there. Previous modelling by the federal health department showed we could face a shortage of 2000 GPs in Victoria by 2033.
"The success we and the Victorian Government delivered by boosting the GP training pipeline has likely reduced that risk, but there will always be local challenges, especially outside our cities. The government should consider opportunities to build on the lessons learned and support communities which need assistance attracting GPs."
