COORDINARE recently made a submission to the Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee Inquiry into the provision of GP and related primary health services to outer metropolitan, rural, and regional Australia.

Read our submission here or find out more information about the inquiry here.

Although there are many issues affecting the supply of primary care in rural and regional areas (Medicare rebates, rural generalist training pathways etc), we chose to focus on those areas that we feel our PHN could value-add to this inquiry due to our activities in our region.

In this submission, we proposed that any improvement in the sustainability and access to primary care in rural and regional areas will only be achieved by working collaboratively across the federal-state health service boundaries and by including local stakeholders to design and implement place-based, integrated and sustainable solutions. We also argued for allowing regional areas to have Distribution Priority Area (DPA) status.

Insights gained through our work with general practice and the local community was essential in informing this submission. We sincerely thank those of you who kindly and generously provided input and insight into our submission document.