AMA VICDOC Autumn 2024 - Magazine - Page 25
To draw people back
into rural towns and
improve socioeconomic
and educational status,
we need to turn our focus
to diversifying rural jobs
and skills and building
towns with a future.
➔
—
SO – WHAT CAN BE DONE?
—
We can remedy the effects of increasing urbanisation
through market forces by shifting our rural health
policies back towards reasonable levels of government
intervention. Government initiatives for rural
healthcare currently revolve around enforcing people
to work rurally – for example via bonded medical
places and rural training pathways – or increasing
monetary incentives for rural work. However, this
does nothing to break the fundamental cycle of
decline in rural hospitals and towns. To draw people
back into rural towns and improve socioeconomic
and educational status, we need to turn our focus to
diversifying rural jobs and skills and building towns
with a future. We need to set up rural businesses in a
way that sets them up for a service-based future. We
also need to turn to a different model of care for rural
hospitals – moving the burden of care from centralised
hospitals to decentralised rural health centres that
allow healthcare to be tailored to local needs. Lastly,
while certain rural hospitals have transitioned from an
activity-based funding model to block funding, rural
GPs need to be given the same type of funding to
truly give traction to the decentralised approach.
Ultimately, we need to move away from an urbancentric narrative towards one that recognises
the importance of rural wellbeing for Australian
wellbeing. In doing so, we can finally move from
the margins the rural voice so that it is no longer
that of an outsider.
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VI CD O C SU M M ER 2022
