Radio interview with Minister Butler and Nicole Dyer, ABC Gold Coast Breakfast Radio - 21 November 2024

Read the transcript of Minister Butler's interview with Nicole Dyer on Southport Medicare Urgent Care Clinic opening; vaping crackdown.

The Hon Mark Butler MP
Minister for Health and Aged Care

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NICOLE DYER, HOST: We have another bulk billing Urgent Care Clinic opening on the Gold Coast. If that sounds very foreign to you, Urgent Care Clinic, perhaps you haven't used the one that has been operating for the past year at Oxenford. If you have, I'd love to get your feedback on that. Has it been very helpful? The fact that you can bulk bill. Who was staffing it at the time? Did you feel that it did prevent you from going to emergency because you had an option? Or maybe you're hearing me right now and you went, what, I had no idea there was this clinic here on the Gold Coast. Well, now there are two. There will officially be two that will be operating from today. The latest one in Southport. Federal Health Minister Mark Butler is here to tell you more. Minister good morning.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Good morning.
 
DYER: How successful has the clinic been at Oxenford, at the northern end of the coast?
 
BUTLER: It's been a really important part of the network that we're rolling out across the country. We started this about the middle of last year. It was an election promise I made in 2022, and already across the country, 900,000 patients have gone through our Urgent Care Clinics and at Oxenford there's been around 10,000 patients that have gone through, generally it's around 300 every week. This is open seven days a week. It's fully bulk billed, so completely free of charge and available for walk in appointments. It's designed to do really is to take pressure off the local ED. We know how important that is at the Gold Coast, because you have the busiest emergency department in the country. But also just give people and particularly parents, an option to get urgent care. Care they need very quickly but not necessarily in a hospital emergency department. What we're finding at Oxenford is that two out of every five patients that have gone through that clinic were under the age of 15. Your kid falls off the skateboard and breaks their wrist or gets injured at Saturday afternoon sport or has a respiratory illness that you're desperately worried about and can't wait a few days to get into your normal GP. That's an option for them, and they get high quality care doctors and nurses who often have a background in emergency medicine and importantly, it's fully bulk billed.
 
DYER: How many doctors and nurses are stationed at Oxenford, and what will the numbers be like at Southport?
 
BUTLER: Generally it's operating on the basis of a doctor being available the entire time it's open. Generally you'll go in, you'll be triaged by a nurse a bit, like happens in the emergency departments and you'll be seen by a doctor. What we know is that they're working very quickly. I mean, obviously at some times of the day they get a little busy but compared to waiting hours and hours in an emergency department, this the overwhelming feedback I get is that this is a vastly, vastly better experience. This is a model that operates overseas. This is a model that operates pretty widely in countries we usually compare ourselves to: the US, Europe, UK, New Zealand's got a very, very developed, mature urgent care system. It's something I think that is going to really add value to our terrific healthcare system we have here. It's something in between your usual general practice where you'll go to see for general health issues on the one hand, and a fully equipped hospital, which is really there for life threatening emergencies.
 
DYER: Are you finding people are going there for the right reasons? Because finding a bulk billing GP is very difficult. People are struggling for a ten-minute consultation. It can cost you around $80, and if you've got a sick child and they don't bulk billed children, it can get really, expensive. So are people using these Urgent Care Clinics for the right reasons? And do we have any idea of whether there's any confusion about what these clinics can offer when people roll up?
 
BUTLER: Inevitably there are a few people who roll up for more general healthcare, which is not what their intended purpose is. These are usually co-located with existing general practices so people can be referred back to their usual GP. Every now and then as well someone will present who actually needs hospital care. We have very clear protocols for these Urgent Care Clinics with the local hospital. In your case, the Gold Coast University Hospital and with local ambulance services, so that it's very clear that if, for example, someone presents to the ED, they might be better cared for at the Urgent Care Clinic, they might be referred there. But importantly, if someone presents to an Urgent Care Clinic who really does need to go to hospital, that is actioned very quickly as well. In terms of people going for a routine vaccination or a routine chronic care check there's not many of them, and we're able to refer them back to their usual GP. But you're absolutely right, bulk billing has been in freefall generally for visits to your GP over the last few years. We had freezers to the Medicare rebate for six years, which really put the financial squeeze on GPs. That's why the tripling of the bulk billing incentive, which was a part of our Budget last year, has been such a game changer for general practice. We've stopped the slide in bulk billing across the country. We've seen a rebound in bulk billing in every state and territory over the last 12 months, which I'm very pleased about. That's delivered, for example, on the Gold Coast, almost 150,000 additional bulk billed visits to the GP just in the last 12 months. Now I want to see that keep improving. It is still tough to find a bulk billed GP I recognise that; we need to do more.
 
DYER: It is, it absolutely is. Can I jump in though Federal Health Minister Mark Butler on ABC Gold Coast you mentioned the Urgent Care Clinics, the latest one at Southport, second one on the Gold Coast is opening today, seven days, what are the operating hours?
 
BUTLER: I don't have those operating hours off the top of my head. We're contracting with them to do 8am to 10pm, seven days a week. Now, not every clinic is able to start with those hours because they're recruiting workforce, they might start with shorter hours. But the idea is to have them operating extended hours. We particularly look at what the busiest time at the local hospital is now. Pretty much every time is busy at the Gold Coast University Hospital. We’re very much in communication with the hospital system because we've really got two objectives here; the first is obviously to provide people with high quality care that's close to them, convenient, timely and free of charge.
 
DYER: So x-rays can be done on site?
 
BUTLER: Absolutely. A lot of the presentations are fractious. that's obviously very important. A term of the contract with these clinics is that they have access to x-rays and pathology. The Southport Clinic has it on site. Some of the clinics have it up the road, but they have a commercial arrangement with a provider. Again, they're fully free of charge. So that's obviously a critical part of being an urgent care service. You've got to be able to deal with fractures, identify them and then treat them. But as I was about to say one of the secondary purposes of this is to take pressure off the local hospitals. That's really how we've decided the location of these clinics around busy hospitals that have lots of what they call non-urgent or semi-urgent presentations. And already around the country, we're seeing the number of those presentations, the less urgent ones, those presentations that don't need a fully equipped hospital like heart attacks do and strokes do and suchlike. We're starting to see them drop off, which is allowing those hospitals to focus their resources on the life-threatening emergencies that are coming through their front door.
 
DYER: Federal Health Minister Mark Butler on ABC Gold Coast. Will this be the second and last Urgent Care Clinic we'll have here on the Gold Coast?
 
BUTLER: We promised 50 last year and we delivered 58, which included the clinic at Oxenford. We budgeted another 29 this year and we worked with state governments.  
 
DYER: Will there be more here on the coast though? I mean, obviously there'll be more around Australia.
 
BUTLER: We don't have a budget for more now but these are working terrifically well.
 
DYER: How do they differ from satellite hospitals which we also have? I'm just trying to educate my listeners because it is there's a lot of options, which is great. But we hear about satellite hospitals being built. We've got Urgent Care Clinics. How do they work with each other?
 
BUTLER: They do. Satellite hospitals are particularly a Queensland model, other states don't have them. We don't operate them ourselves. But my feedback has been that they're working very, very well in Queensland. Again, taking that pressure off local hospitals. Again, I have to say our Urgent Care Clinics have been developed in close consultation with the relevant state government in your case, Queensland, obviously to make sure we're not tripping over each other to make sure we're not duplicating resources. As I said, really importantly, to make sure we've got the protocols right, so that people, if they end up at the wrong place, are quickly referred to the right place. That doesn't happen very often but when it does people have to be shifted very quickly to make sure they're getting the right care.

DYER: Quick question, though, before I let you go, Federal Health Minister Mark Butler. July this year, laws changed so that all vapes and vaping products, regardless of whether they contain nicotine or not, can only be sold in pharmacies for helping people quit smoking. We have a lot of vape shops here on the Coast. There seems to be a disconnect between law changes and actual changes on the ground. What is your response to that and when will we start to see some changes?
 
BUTLER: I was pretty clear with people that this would take a while to really get on top of because there'd been a tsunami of, vapes coming into the country and then vape stores opening around the country as well. We put an import ban in place on the 1st of January and since then we've seized almost 7 million disposable vapes taken out of the hands of our kids. They're the ones who your listeners might be familiar with. They've got cartoon characters on them, brightly coloured, bubble gum flavoured, so obviously targeted at children, not adults. We're starting to seize them at the border successfully. We're hearing from source countries like China, for example, that they're now thinking of Australia as a much less attractive export market because all of their products are getting seized. So that's good and some of the vape stores are shutting down, some of the vape stores are shutting down as well.
 
DYER: There's one down the road from this very radio station at Mermaid Beach that has a sandwich board still open?   
 
BUTLER: Yeah, far too many of them still open. We've had hundreds of operations between Commonwealth authorities and state government authorities going around the country and slowly we're mopping it up. I have been clear, at some point, we're going to have to prosecute someone. We've got very serious fines in the federal laws that are passed through the Parliament this year, fines of up to $2.2 million, jail time of up to seven years for continuing to sell these products. I'm deadly serious about enforcing these, and we are continuing to work with state governments to get through the system and see these things taken out of the hands of our kids.
 
DYER: Mark Butler, I appreciate your time this morning.

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