Wednesday, 23 February 2022

HMS Collective

Mr QUILTY (Northern Victoria) (18:13): (1767) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health and Minister for Ambulance Services. I recently had the opportunity to meet with the HMS Collective. The collective is an emerging community-based not-for-profit organisation which strives to keep people with non-life-threatening illnesses and injury safe in their homes and out of ambulances and hospitals. Theirs is an innovative model which is collaborative, simple and effective and has had a lot of success overseas. Already they have made a significant positive impact to the lives of many in the communities in which they operate. HMS Collective uses a multidisciplinary approach to community health and employs paramedics, nurses, OTs, physios and osteopaths to treat people in their own home—people who would otherwise contact 000 to access medical care. Those they treat may have conditions such as dementia, disability and mental ill health, or they may have other ongoing chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, or live with multiple health conditions.

You would think the emergence of a social enterprise would be something the government would embrace, particularly as we frequently hear in this chamber about our state’s overwhelmed ambulance service and hospital system driven by callers that do not need ambulances or emergency treatment but have no other option. HMS Collective could ease pressure on these systems while playing a major role in reconnecting people to preventative and primary health care. Through meeting these aims call-outs to our 000 services should decrease.

However, they have been told that because they are not all across Victoria they cannot act as a diversion service for non-critical 000 calls, and apparently at $200 a visit they would be far too expensive for the state. In their own reporting they have found that in the communities in which they work they have reduced ambulance call-out times by an average of 90 hours a week. If you put a dollar value on this, the savings would be enormous, not to mention the flow-on savings found in reduced emergency triage and treatment costs for the state. That all sounds wonderful. However, the demand for HMS Collective is increasing, and the organisation runs on the smell of an oily rag. They largely rely on community funding drives, My Aged Care, NDIS and self-funding. Further to this, some of the passionate staff donate time on top of their wage to help the organisation make ends meet. I met one passionate paramedic who donates all her time and chooses to volunteer for HMS Collective because she believes in its aim and purpose, and the management team do not take salaries so they can pay their clinical staff—all of this with no direct Victorian government funding. In fact when they contacted the Department of Health they were told department policy was to never partner with private health organisations.

Now, I am not one to advocate for greater government spending, but I think the emergence of HMS Collective is a sign of civil society filling the gap for a service which is sorely needed. An organisation such as HMS Collective harkens back to the way medical treatment was delivered at the start of the last century, by motivated non-government, not-for-profit organisations, but with a modern and multidisciplinary approach. If some of the cost savings they generate could be directed back to them, they could create something great for Victoria. The action I seek is for the minister to meet with HMS Collective to discuss the circuit-breaker opportunities they provide and explore how the organisation can alleviate some of the pressures on ambulance and hospital emergency services in Victoria.