Smythesdale health services
Ms STALEY (Ripon) (17:06): (6418) My adjournment tonight is to the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is that he step in to restore GP services to Smythesdale. Smythesdale currently has a GP practice that is provided by Ballarat Community Health, but Ballarat Community Health has recently advised the community that it will be ceasing that service largely because it is having difficulty recruiting another GP after one left. The community is now going to be left without a GP—any GP. They have gone from two GPs to none on virtually no notice. The community are therefore unhappy about this, and I do not blame them. What needs to happen here is for the government to work with the federal government to come up with a funding policy that will require regional cities to offer some sort of outreach service to their peri-urban areas. It is not good enough that people have to go into Ballarat from Smythesdale. I note that we have recently announced that we will provide a bus from Smythesdale into Ballarat every 30 minutes so people will actually be able to get into Ballarat more easily than they can at the moment, because it is only three times a day at the moment. People are now currently left in a very difficult situation if they want to go to the doctor. Yet at the same time, the government sees fit to spend money on half-page ads in the local paper about their so-called health achievements—at the same time that services are being removed from the Smythesdale community. So rather than the ads boasting about what they think they are getting on with in health, perhaps they could get on with actually saving GP services in the growing community of Smythesdale.