Tim READ (Brunswick) (13:08): Cohealth is about to close their GP clinics in Collingwood, Fitzroy and Kensington. I worked at these clinics for about six years back in the 1990s, so I feel for the 25 counsellors and doctors who will be redeployed or looking for new jobs and who are already farewelling their patients. These are people with unusually large numbers of social and psychological problems, often mixed with chronic disease and pain or addiction. Seventy per cent of these patients have a concession card. Thousands of vulnerable inner-city residents will soon need someone else to look after them, and it is not going to be the private system supported by Medicare, which caters best for people with simpler needs. Indeed this care will fall to our public hospitals, particularly our busy emergency departments, and the state will end up paying even more for this than if it had supported Cohealth to continue treating them in the first place.
For decades the state has been slowly walking away from the medical care provided by community health centres, leaving it to Medicare. This outsourcing, which began in the 1990s, along with the corporatisation of community health, has led to this situation.
When state and federal governments fail to invest adequate funding in social services like community health, the need does not just go away, it gets heaped on crowded emergency departments and overrun social services. Community outcry has shown that Victorians want these clinics saved, and the Victorian Labor government needs to listen to them.