A recent call from mayors in the New England region to split the Hunter New England Health (HNEH) district into two separate entities will be a fruitless exercise if more health dollars and resourcing are not forthcoming.
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Maitland and Cessnock State MPs Jenny Aitchison and Clayton Barr agree health resources are "city- centric" and more focus needs to be placed onto rural and regional health.
Both parliamentarians believe the only solution is for the State to focus on bankrolling embattled country services with the end result being better staff conditions and patient care.
ACM reported last month how a "Newcastle-centric" health district is siphoning resources away from the more rural areas of the region, prompting calls from New England medical staff and community leaders to separate from the Hunter.
Doctors from the New England say a lack of services in their region had forced sick cancer patients to drive more than 3.5 hours to Newcastle for "something as simple as a PET scan", or to sign a consent form.
It comes as all eight mayors of the New England Joint Organisation of councils (NEJO) voted to investigate resurrecting the old Hunter and New England Health Districts. The Hunter New England Health district covers public health services from Newcastle to Tenterfield, near the Queensland border.
Australian Community Media (ACM) published a special report in September which revealed a rural and regional health system under great duress and just last week reported how the State Government unveiled a new arm of the health service aimed at supporting the state's rural and regional health workers.
Mr Barr said centralisation of services seems to always lead to regions missing out, while city centres don't seem to feel the same loss.
"We could leave HNEH as it is, or split it up into 2, 5 or 10 smaller units - but the truth will still be that the health dollars are now spread too thin after 10 years of "efficiency dividends" which in real terms means a 20% budget cut," Mr Barr said.
"The cost of health care increases at about 7% per year, so if your budget only goes up by 5% per year then in real terms you are going backwards and you are unable to do as much the following year, as you might have done the year before. There is no end in sight for this Government and their reliance on more "efficiency dividends" in the future.
Mr Barr said that as services at Cessnock and Kurri Kurri hospitals have declined over recent decades, sick people have been forced to choose between their health and travel to access health services.
"And our ambulances and paramedics are having to take people out of area to get the healthcare they need, leaving our streets without a nearby ambulance service," Mr Barr said.
"The "face" of these many cuts to the health budget are the patients, their families and friends, and our incredibly hard working health staff. It is us, we the people, that are bearing the load of cuts, cuts, cuts to our health services as the bean counters need to find more and more services to scale back, shrink or shut down each year because the budget isn't keeping up with the cost of providing the services."
Jenny Aitchison agreed the issue of rural health inequity comes down to dollars.
"And we need more of them, but I don't know how hiving off parts of the district to form new districts increases the money for rural health across the state," She said.
"I understand people like the idea of having their own bucket of money to spend on health in their region, but what if they don't get a big enough bucket? In any case, shouldn't health be the one thing that is coordinated on a needs based approach?
"Ultimately, people across the Hunter New England just need more money for health - so that we can pay for the broad range of workers we need in the health system, and so those workers can be supported to work in the system, and not feel that they are doing an impossible task," Ms Aitchison said.
"We need to be able to get the tests we need when we need them, and we need access to good GPs and well funded community based health services so we can prevent people being in hospital in the first place.
"That's why Labor initiated the Rural Health Inquiry in the NSW Legislative Council. To shine a light on these inequities in the health system. We want to ensure that it is not your post code that determines your health outcomes.
"It is not just our state-based hospital system that is being impacted by a lack of prioritisation in rural health. There are levers that need to have been pulled by the Federal Government well before now. We need to have enough GPs, with certainty about incentives.
"We need a licence for our new state of the art MRI machine, and we need access to clinical trials in the Hunter.