How can we get better primary health care access, quality and affordability that Labor has promised? We need to learn from what’s worked and failed overseas.
Primary care doctors have long played an important role in providing birth control. Now, with the fall of Roe, they could help fill a critical need for comprehensive family planning services.
Less than half of Canadians can see their doctor same-day, and millions don’t even have a family doctor. Improving access to care means providing doctors with the support they need to focus on patients.
With COVID-19 placing heavy demands on the health-care system, non-COVID patients may struggle to access care, putting women, people in poor health and those without a regular doctor at risk.
Reports suggest people have been visiting their GPs for a certificate clearing them of COVID-19, at the request of their employer or school. But doctors can’t conclusively clear a person of the virus.
Jane Hall, University of Technology Sydney and Kees Van Gool, University of Technology Sydney
Paying doctors a fee for each service they provide isn’t delivering optimal value for the health dollar. Instead, we should pay doctors a lump sum to care for a patient’s medical problem over time.
Individuals who carry the breast cancer genes BRCA1 or BRCA2 are often unaware of the fact. That suggests that physicians need a new way to apply DNA-based screens to identify those at risk.
For many of the nation’s poor, food and shelter are more important than health care. Questions of insurance coverage loom broadly, but another question lingers: how to treat the poor we do not see.
People ending up in hospital for diabetes, tooth decay, or other conditions that should be treatable or manageable out of hospital is a warning sign of system failure.
The government must do more to deliver a 21st-century health system – not just to improve its standing with voters but to meet the health needs of all Australians.
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne