Wednesday, 5 February 2025

 Annabelle CLEELAND (Euroa) (19:06): (983) My adjournment this evening is for the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is a guarantee that no funding or services will be cut at local hospitals across the Euroa electorate. The government’s recently announced health services plan, set to take effect on 1 July, has sparked deep concern across my communities. Under this plan, our smaller regional hospitals will be merged with larger hospitals to form centralised hubs hours away from the communities they are meant to serve. This is not just a bureaucratic shuffle, this is a direct threat to the healthcare access of thousands of people. Patients, medical professionals and hospital staff are rightly worried about what this will mean for the future, and so am I. I fear for the survival of our smaller hospitals, the heartbeats of our communities, as they are swallowed by a system that prioritises efficiency over accessibility. Instead of empowering these hospitals, the government is introducing more red tape, stripping them of autonomy and centralising decision-making far from the people who rely on them most. Let us call it what it is: a blatant attempt to remove local voices from critical healthcare decisions.

These are forced amalgamations. Our communities deserve better than this. They deserve to have a say in the future of their health care. I am deeply concerned that existing services will be stripped from smaller hospitals and funnelled into larger facilities to make up for their resourcing shortfall. This means patients will be forced to travel even greater distances to access essential care, something that is simply not viable in a region where public and patient transport options are woefully inadequate. This government is deadset on entrenching a postcode lottery when it comes to our health care.

I have heard too many distressing stories of patients being stranded by ambulance at metro hospitals, left with no way to get home. Their only option is paying hundreds of dollars for a taxi, and it is an option that for most is completely out of reach. While the government spends time engineering hospital mergers, it has utterly failed to invest in the transport services that make health care accessible in the first place. Volunteer-driven initiatives like the Royal Flying Doctor Service community transport team in Heathcote are still waiting for funding assurances from the government, despite the vital role they play in keeping regional patients connected to care.

The health services plan is not about improving health care; it is forced hospital amalgamations. These are not mergers by stealth, they are blatant, top-down decisions that risk gutting local healthcare services. We only need to look at what happened with Grampians Health to see the writing on the wall. Services were cut, communities left without the care they relied on and decision-making was dragged further from the people it impacts most. We cannot let this happen to our communities. Our regional towns simply cannot afford to lose the hospitals and services they rely on. I am calling on this government to do the right thing: guarantee these forced hospital amalgamations will not cost us essential local services. Regional Victorians deserve better, and I will fight to ensure they get it.