The rural college has put forward its proposal on how to sustainably fund rural maternity services for the long term.
With a federal budget just around the corner, the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine is calling on the government to commit to improving rural maternity services.
This would align with the principles of the National Consensus Framework for Rural Maternity Services to establish sustainable funding for rural and remote birthing services.
In ACRRM’s pre-budget submission, the college outlined the funding support needed to tackle three key issues:
- Preventing further closures of maternity services,
- Assisting communities in reopening services (where possible) and
- Strengthening the long-term viability of local birthing care.
Rural generalists have been positioned as the star players to ensure this reform, particularly in smaller hospitals where specialist obstetric services are not available.
“There’s a set of steps down the road in terms of planning,” ACRRM president Dr Rod Martin told The Medical Republic.
“It’s a question of provisioning because there’s a real time criticality when it comes to the rate of loss of maternity services.
“If you treat maternity says services in rural areas as canaries in the coal mine, as soon as you lose the maternity service, there’s not much reason for any statistics to be there.
“It’s a national level problem that needs clear and direct national-level provisioning to be able to fund the changes that will need to take place.”
ACRRM has put a price on these reforms, with the proposed funding changes expected to cost the MBS $50 million over four years.
Related
The National Consensus Framework for Rural Maternity Services was published in June 2025 with both maternity and rural advocacy bodies alike cited as supporters.
The push for improved maternity services comes as part of the push to establish more sustainable rural and remote healthcare workforce numbers to then allow for more specialists to practice in these locations.
“The biggest issue is we need to attract and retain qualified staff across the entire spectrum,” former president of the National Association of Specialist Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (NASOG) Associate Professor Gino Pecoraro told TMR.
“It’s a natural want to be able to deliver your baby close to where you live, and if you lose maternity services in a place, it has a knock on effect other health services in that area.
“The issue is that we have a mound distribution of appropriately trained people, the issue is getting them to where they’re more desperately needed, and that’s a complex issue.
“If you can make sure that there’s a thriving private obstetric unit that that frequently acts as an attractant, and that requires the private health insurance and the Medicare rebates to be sorted out.”
