The New South Wales government recently unveiled its Regional Health Strategic Plan 2022-2032, outlining its vision for delivering quality health services to regional and rural communities over the next decade.

The release of the NSW Regional Health Strategic Plan 2022-2023 was delayed during COVID-19 and amid the Regional Health Inquiry, but was finally published in February this year. 

The plan aims to address the challenges faced by regional communities, including the shortage of doctors and health professionals, inadequate infrastructure and a lack of funding for health services.

According to Bronnie Taylor, Minister for Regional Health, the plan is a significant step forward in addressing the health needs of regional and remote communities. 

"Our regional communities care deeply about their healthcare services and rightly so. Regional NSW is the backbone of our state and is an incredible place to live, work, and raise a family,” she said. 

“To guarantee these thriving communities have continued success, it is paramount that we ensure access to the health services they need and deserve.”

Taylor also highlighted the importance of changing the way healthcare is delivered to patients in rural and regional areas who have unique needs.

“Healthcare delivered in Regional NSW is among the best in the world but it is also true that attracting and retaining staff is becoming increasingly difficult and the advancement in specialist medical care, which is leading to better outcomes, often requires some of these services to be delivered in larger centres.

“This has seen changes to the way we deliver health care in the bush and we need to adapt,” she said.

 However, not everyone is convinced that the plan will deliver on its promises.

Roy Butler, the state member for Barwon, has expressed his concerns about the plan, claiming that the new document is a rushed attempt to release something prior to the election. 

“We continually raise the issue that there are no metrics relating to the availability of treatment, or the time taken for treatment to be offered and delivered,” said Mr Butler.

“The plan shouldn’t be signed off in a hurry in the next few weeks by the current government, it should be road-tested and available for comment by rural people and rural leaders across regional NSW.”

While the government’s priority on regional healthcare is welcomed, Mr Butler says that a lack of transparency is why the release of the strategic plan should be delayed until after the election.

“Reading through the details such as are available, the key strategy missing from the last health plan that ended in 2021 are hard and fast metrics, it’s now 2023 and again that looks lacking,” he said. 

Mr Butler believes that the reason for the lack of metrics in the plan are simply because such metrics would draw attention to the massive under resourcing provided for regional and rural health.

“Hiding from scrutiny of under resourcing is not a good enough reason to avoid placing that style of metric in a strategic regional health plan,” he argued.

“Aside from old-fashioned honesty, there are structural reasons that metrics on availability of treatment, time taken for treatment to be offered and assessment of the final outcome of treatment are crucial to improvement.”

Mr Butler also made the case that, as the Commonwealth drives virtually all state health funding, identifying under resourcing by individual health sites would allow a proper discussion with the Commonwealth on bed allocation, resourcing for beds, and training and support for regional health workforces.

“The current workforce is not the problem, it's the high-level management who are placed in the position of continually explaining away declining health outcomes which are driven by lack of resourcing- as not due to lack of resourcing,” he said.

Mr Butler has now asked the government why they would attempt to roll out the next decade of strategic planning without widespread consultation on the details of that plan, weeks before an election.

Overall, the Regional Health Strategic Plan 2022-2032 is a positive step forward for healthcare in regional NSW, but it remains to be seen whether it will be able to deliver on its promises and address the complex challenges faced by regional communities.