AMA Victoria is asking for urgent departmental intervention, after the major tertiary hospital began enforcing stricter geographic catchment rules.
AMA Victoria is calling on the state’s new health minister to urgently review the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s new specialist outpatient referral rules, which sees the hospital reportedly turning away referrals for patients outside its local catchment area.
In a post to LinkedIn last week, the state medical association said it was “concerned” that the change appeared to have come into effect without GPs having been consulted.
“AMA Victoria has asked the Department to urgently review the change and clarify whether it complies with statewide referral policy,” the post read.
“No clinically appropriate referral should simply be returned because of a patient’s postcode.
“Where another service is more appropriate, the referral should be transferred directly once that service has agreed to accept responsibility.”
Victoria’s public hospitals all had to abide by a standardised statewide referral criteria.
Technically, this still allowed public health services to develop local policies, procedures, and protocols to manage referrals – but the rules were still reasonably clear.
“Statewide referral criteria describe when a patient can be referred to a Victorian public health service and conditions that are out of scope for public health services,” the policy document read.
“In the absence of statewide referral criteria, local referral criteria describe when a patient should be referred to a specific health service and conditions that are out of scope for that health service.
“If the requested service is available, health services must accept referrals that meet statewide referral criteria or, in their absence, local clinical criteria.”
It specifically stated that reasons such as “where the patient lives”, “to whom the referral is addressed”, “a long list of patients waiting for appointments”, or “a lack of appointments for public consultations” could not be used as reasons for not accepting a referral that otherwise met the statewide or local criteria.
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For its part, the Royal Melbourne Hospital said it was “proud to deliver world-class care to the Victorian community every day” and that while it provided statewide emergency and trauma care, “other specialist services are focused on our catchment area”.
Over the last financial year, The Medical Republic understands, there was a 21% increase in the number of people referred to the Royal Melbourne Hospital for outpatient care and more than half of the referrals came from outside its catchment.
Patients already on outpatient waiting lists would still receive care at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
