The Age 20 June 2024 | Opinion Jan Beer
This past week the Allan government’s stocks in regional Victoria plummeted to a new low.
On Saturday, this masthead revealed secret Labor government plans would potentially consolidate Victoria’s 75 public health services into 12 networks, forcing the amalgamation of a number of rural health services into just six new entities.
A day earlier, there were reports that despite large overall increases in funding for Victorian hospitals, at least 20 small rural hospitals have already been advised to expect funding cuts of up to 30 per cent through the 2024-25 financial year.
In response to the plans being made public, the state Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas reiterated that “there will be no hospital closures under my watch”, contrasting Victoria’s 75 health services to the far fewer number of services in New South Wales and Queensland. If there were amalgamations, Thomas said, the state could expect to see an improvement in access to services and the delivery of healthcare “closer to home”.
Melburnians may think that people in regional Victoria are not as sophisticated as their metropolitan cousins. But I can assure you, we are not fools. We can smell a dead rat. We know when something is off.
Regional Victorians know that assurances of “no closures under my watch” are meaningless. The repeated turnover of health ministers in Victoria – Thomas is the fourth in 10 years – means such an assurance is shallow in the long run. The broken promises of the 2026 Commonwealth Games continue to resonate across the state.
Regional Victorians remember the Kennett government’s merger of local governments in the 1990s and how these hollowed out small regional towns as resources were “consolidated” onto one site. We know the promised local government savings were not realised, and that rural economies suffered as a result, all while our access to services was reduced.
Regional Victorians understand – arguably much better than our urban counterparts – that the most powerful means of guaranteeing the delivery of services closer to home is to retain local boards and local leadership within local hospitals.
Without local leadership, cash-strapped networks, headquartered one to two hours away from small regional communities, will progressively concentrate funding at major regional campuses in the interests of “increased efficiency”. Communities will be denied an effective voice on single regional boards. When major natural disasters occur, such as the Black Saturday bushfires or the floods of 2022, there will be no local capacity to rapidly respond to the critical needs of individual communities. The capacity for local innovation, such as the monthly primary health outreach services, targeted at the farming community at the monthly Yea cattle sales, which is an Australia first, will just disappear.
There is little doubt that over the coming months regional Victorians will become increasingly aware of the shortcomings of the shotgun amalgamation of health services in the Grampians region, which has led to a loss of local access to services in smaller communities and forced an increase in reliance on inadequate public transport to access care remotely.
More regional Victorians will also become aware of what some of us already know, which is the damning findings of reduced access to health services and general practitioners in smaller regional communities in NSW that resulted from the consolidation of health services into Local Health Districts. These are documented in the NSW Legislative Council May 2020 Report into Health Outcomes and Access to Health and Hospital Services in Rural, Regional and Remote New South Wales, which revealed, among other things, critical staffing shortages that included some emergency departments having no doctors, patients facing significant challenges in accessing care compared with those who live in metropolitan areas, and a culture of fear in raising concerns at both staff and community levels.
Singling out small rural hospitals for budget cuts in the coming financial year will create enormous and lasting anger in communities across Victoria. Rural folk have a special relationship with their health services. As individuals and within our families, we have personally contributed towards the cost of capital works and provide support through auxiliaries. We serve as hospital volunteers. Some are war memorial hospitals with continuing ties to RSLs; the links between community and healthcare are strong and many.
Last Saturday, as the news of the Allan government’s proposal leaked, around 2000 residents of Mansfield braved the winter cold to support their local hospital, oppose amalgamation and demand retention of its local leadership and board. This weekend, the Yea community will be holding a public meeting to take up the fight. Alexandra residents will gather the following week, and you can expect that communities will continue to mobilise.
This is just the beginning of what will become a widespread revolt against city-based politicians and bureaucrats arrogantly assuming they know what’s best for regional and rural Victorians, without any pretence of genuine consultation or listening to the communities directly affected.
Jan Beer is a resident of Yea and the convenor of the Hands Off Yea Hospital campaign.
