Drama as doctors run short on Eyre Peninsula of South Australia

A district mayor revealed the disturbing scenario outside a Senate inquiry into doctors and medical services.

Streaky Bay District Council Mayor Travis Barber said a pregnant woman from Eyre Peninsula had gone to the local hospital, but a doctor was unavailable.

"They began driving to Port Lincoln, but the baby was born on the roadside," he said.

That, he said, was in addition to the seven days over Christmas when Streaky Bay lacked an ambulance or doctor.

Mr Barber had just finished telling the inquiry committee how he had raised money himself to buy two heart monitors and another blood-pressure machine for the local hospital.

This had resulted from his noting the scarcity of such machines while his daughter was being treated for gastro, then severe diabetes.

The inquiry is looking into the provision of general practitioner and related primary health services around the country.

Mr Barber told the committee that doctors working in the country needed bigger tax breaks.

They should pay 25 to 30 per cent tax instead of about 50 per cent plus receive a share of their medical clinic's revenue, he said.

Earlier, he had outlined how Streaky Bay was spending about $1 million to maintain a doctor, locums and a clinic.

He said training processes were hampering the problems with supply of general practitioners to the country.

There was an international doctor in Adelaide who was driving a cab because he had to do two to three years updating medical skills to qualify to practise in Australia.

Mr Barber sat with representatives of Goyder Regional Council and Kimba District Council to present the situation regarding lack of doctors and medical services.

Kimba chief executive officer Debra Larwood said her town was competing with Whyalla, Port Lincoln and metropolitan areas for general practitioners.

"We are seeking funding for a doctor to come to Kimba. Once they come to the town, they enjoy it and end up staying," she said.

Kimba Mayor Dean Johnson said there should be a "priority of needs" for country towns, but doctors were being "siphoned off" before they got there.

The town has been without a doctor for six of the past eight years.

"We are simply not training enough general practitioners. Most graduates want to become specialists - isn't a GP a specialist of its own, particularly in rural and remote communities?" Mr Johnson said.

He suggested graduates should be guided through the system by communities.

"A sustainable practice will cost less over time, undoubtedly," he said.

Goyder chief executive officer David Stevenson told the committee that for many years his council had struggled to provide the medical services needed by the community.

Outside the hearing, South Australia-based Independent Senator Rex Patrick said the peninsula had a "crisis" on its hands.

"If you do not have a doctor in town, you are less inclined to come to stay," he said.

He proposed lifting a freeze on the Medicare rebate to help remedy the problems.

"We have seen the sudden closure of one general practice in Whyalla," he said.

"Rather than go to a doctor, people go to hospital where the cost of treating them is substantially higher," he said.

Doctor services in the remote South Australian town of Streaky Bay are maintained through raffles, community fundraising and council contributions.

This scenario was described by Jonas Woolford at the senate inquiry.

Mr Woolford was questioned by New South Wales Labor Senator Deborah O'Neill about how Streaky Bay, on Eyre Peninsula, had reacted to the lack of a doctor for the town and district.

He replied that when he heard the clinic was going to close, he attended a public meeting with 300 people.

The meeting had adopted an action plan and the Streaky Bay Council stepped in with a rate increase to contribute to a $200,000 loan while the Council took over for four-to-five months until they set up an association to run it.

From May 2018, for the first two years, locum doctors were funded at $2000 a day to serve the community before Doctor Victoria Bradley, a new doctor, joined the service.

"We are running at a $25,000 a quarter loss," Mr Woolford said.

"There needs to be more emphasis on attracting people into the general practitioner area.

"It seems a lot of doctors are specialising and do not want to be burdened by the on-call (demands), it is not a nice career."

He said that sometimes doctors coming into country towns had to work with "archaic" equipment.

Mr Woolford said it would have been "inconceivable" that the town could be left without medical services with the closest health provision being at Ceduna, many kilometres away.

Senator O'Neill asked Mr Woolford about the $200,000 loan from the community, to which Mr Woolford replied it had mostly been raised through a rate increase imposed by the council.

She asked him whether raffles, community fundraising and council contributions had allowed the clinic to survive, to which Mr Woolford replied yes.

A doctors' training organisation presented a double-sided view of general practitioners to the Senate inquiry.

On one hand, chairman of GPEx Doctor Tony Sherbon said general practitioners want to stay working in hospitals because they are concerned about training for the community component of their education.

Continuing the theme, he said some may be concerned about provisions for leave in the country, which is what "many are looking for". Some trainees, he said, felt the role of general practitioner is not looked at by government as the "central point" it once was.

On a lighter note, he said there had been an increase of about 30 per cent in recent years in trainees taking on the rural pathway.

"Trainees who go through our practice have a greater chance of staying in the country," Dr Sherbon said.

He said the program was "most modern" and colleges in other countries were learning from the Australian experience.

Dr Sherbon and GPEx chief executive Stephanie Clota were appearing before a Senate enquiry into the provision of general practitioner and related primary health services around the country.

Before his appearance, Dr Sherbon said there were 400 doctor trainees around South Australia.

"We have a program to make sure they are well looked after," he said. "These are trainee doctors, but they are training to be specialist GPs.

"Of these, about 115 are in country South Australia, including Port Augusta, Whyalla and Port Lincoln and with vacancies in Port Pirie, plus some in the Aboriginal medical services.

"There are a lot of stresses for GPs, particularly in the COVID era.

"We try to make sure our trainees get a good training experience as well as provide a good service to the public.

"We look after the people who teach them as GP supervisors."

As the inquiry hearing started on Tuesday, two Labor Senators Karen Grogan and Deborah O'Neill, the committee chair Janet Rice of The Greens, and SA-Best Senator Rex Patrick spoke to the media about the situation regarding doctors and medical care.

Senator Grogan, who has a special interest in the Eyre Peninsula, said that she had done a survey which found 84 per cent of people in rural South Australia had struggled to get an appointment with a GP.

She said it was a "really, really important enquiry" into the "crisis" surrounding medical services.

"There are more questions than answers," she said.