… and start making them permanent. Gotcha!
Shadow health minister Anne Ruston wants to see an end to the hugely popular single employer model trials for rural generalists in training… so that they can be made a permanent feature of the health system.
Speaking at Rural Medicine Australia, the annual joint ACRRM and RDAA conference, in Adelaide this morning, Ms Ruston said she would “keep championing [SEM] until it becomes just part of the landscape of medicine” in Australia.
“If we want a specialist workforce in rural and regional Australia, we need to make sure that they’re seeing what goes on in rural and regional Australia and having an opportunity to train there,” she said.
“All I’d say is, I’m absolutely supportive, but we’ve got to stop with these 12-month [trial] extensions and we’ve actually got to start saying ‘this is going to be part of the landscape of how medicine training rolls out in this nation’.
“I think the evaluation has been done. We get it. It’s working. The sector has been consulted. So now we just have to get on with the job of implementing the program.”
When asked by conference MC Dr Norman Swan how she would navigate state-federal tensions if she were ever to become health minister, Ms Ruston said she would work to end cost-shifting.
“I think states and territories and the federal government have got to realise they’re actually spending taxpayers’ money, and all taxpayers are exactly the same people,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re paying taxes through the state system or through the federal system or by the GST.
“They’re the same taxpayers, and that’s whose money you are spending. You have a responsibility. We have a responsibility collectively to spend that as efficiently and as effectively as we possibly can, and right now I don’t believe we are.”
Assistant rural health minister Emma McBride also spoke at the conference opening and did not escape Dr Swan’s trademark grilling.
Dr Swan, a GP and broadcaster, challenged Ms McBride on whether the government had a plan to ensure that increased bulk billing rates were sustainable into the future.
Ms McBride, a former hospital-based pharmacist, said that there had been an uplift in bulk billing when the government initially expanded bulk billing incentives, and that this uptick had now been “sustained”.
“We’ve seen practices that were mixed billing practices move to bulk billing practices,” she said.
“And after talking [to everyone] from individual GPs through to the peak representative bodies, this has been welcome.”
Dr Swan asked directly whether the plan was for last year’s $8 billion bulk billing investment to be increased alongside inflation.
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Ms McBride jokingly asked if health minister Mark Butler was currently in the room before answering.
“As someone who worked in a rural hospital for nearly 10 years and had spent some time in the NHS, I – personally and working with my senior minister – am determined to see a real and sustained change,” she said.
“And there are different levers that we can pull, but there are others that have a say in that.”
Before releasing the assistant rural health minister, Dr Swan also pressed her on whether the federal government was increasing fragmentation of care by increasing the scope of practice of allied health.
“I appreciate that some of these measures have had some good early results, but I also appreciate that many need to be refined, and we need to work to lift this,” Ms McBride said.
“Because we genuinely want to make sure that wherever someone lives – and we know that that now, today, there’s more Australians living in rural or regional Australia than there is in Sydney and Melbourne – this is a strong focus of ours.
“It’s something that we will continue to listen closely to work collaboratively, because we know it needs to improve.”
Rural Medicine Australia 2026 was held at the Adelaide Convention Centre on 22 to 24 October.
