Ouch! While I have to say that the Bankstown GP Coalition Network have achieved their best outcome in that they have a smaller urban Medicare Local which enables them to provide the type of family practice health services it has come at a cost to the people of the Southern Highlands. The Bankstown GP Coalition Network is now connected with the Liverpool-Fairfield and Macarthur Divisions of General Practice. This limits the whole northern Medicare Local to the urban areas within the southern boundary of the Macarthur area.
This change to the Northern Coalition of GP Divisions then changes the configuration of any possible Medicare Local which takes in the Wollondilly and Southern Highlands Shires. So what might happen? Well, as has been reported previously in this blog the, Southern Highlands Division of General Practice has gone remarkably mute on the subject. Their website is devoid of any information available to the community. In fact they have not had an updated newsletter to their member GPs since July 2010. Quite a difference to the Bankstown and Macarthur Divisions websites.
Now here is the dilemma facing us in the Southern Highlands! It may be that our local entrepreneurial CEO of the Southern Highlands Division of General Practice is looking northwards to draw in the Wollondilly general practices to the current Southern Highlands Division. While that might increase the size of the population of their catchment it gives no promise of anything changing to benefit the people's health needs. To date, there has been no communication from the local Division about their plans for the community. How unlike the work done by the Bankstown Division who engaged their community in the fight for their health services.
What will be alarming is if the current CEO and Board of the Southern Highlands Division of General Practice will become the controlling organisation of an enlarged area. One could hope that the GPs of the Wollondilly Shire will insist that there is a spill of the current Board and that the position of CEO is made vacant. I would be confident in saying that most of the GPs in the Southern Highlands would like to have the opportunity to have a purge of the current operators of their Division.
It would be refreshing (but notably unlikely) if Dr Warwick Ruscoe stepped aside. His history of being a medical administrator has not been without question and conflict. Perhaps in the saga of the Medicare Locals history is beginning to repeat itself.
