NSW Health Minister says new facilities count for little without the staff, housing and services to back them.
New hospitals and redevelopments will not fix regional healthcare on their own; the deciding factor is whether there is a workforce to staff them. That was the blunt message from NSW Minister for Health and Regional Health, Ryan Park, addressing a meeting of the Regional Development Australia NSW & ACT Chairs and CEOs at NSW Parliament House recently.
Minister Park said he wanted to speak frankly about the “headwinds” facing regional communities, and pointed to redevelopment work under way in Eurobodalla, Bathurst, Grafton and the Mid North Coast. But he was clear that infrastructure was only ever half the equation.
“What gets me up and going in the morning is expanded services, particularly for regional and rural areas, and they come when you’ve got adequate workforce,” he said.
Services depend on people
Staffing was identified as the most immediate pressure point. Park referred to workforce incentives of up to $20,000 in some hard-to-fill areas, including parts of the maternity workforce, alongside almost a quarter of a billion dollars committed to key health worker accommodation.
Housing, he said, had emerged early in his tenure as a barrier to recruitment – even where a town could attract a worker, suitable accommodation wasn’t always there. NSW Health was drawing on newly built accommodation, modular units and existing properties, though each option came with trade-offs, particularly buying homes in towns already short of housing stock. Further work was needed to fast-track housing and look at greater use of modular construction.
“The workforce issue is real,” Park said. “It is serious.”
“It’s one thing to have new facilities, it’s another thing, to be blunt, to have the services that the community expect.”
Minister Park also pointed to a targeted program of 500 additional paramedics for regional and rural NSW, focused outside the major hubs of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. The rollout is now in its final tranche of 125, with more than 375 already in place. He said staff feedback, including as recently as last week, indicated the program was improving rostering and hospital staffing. He was careful not to oversell it – not a silver bullet, in his words – but said the evidence suggested it had worked.
Maternity and specialist access under strain
Maternity and birthing services remain among the hardest workforce challenges to solve. Minister Park referred to a roughly $44 million package, including 53 additional midwives for areas where services could be established or expanded. Even Wollongong, a large regional centre, was struggling to recruit, and workforce constraints meant birthing services couldn’t open at the new, roughly three-quarter-of-a-billion-dollar Shellharbour Hospital, half an hour down the road, because it would be competing for the same limited pool of midwives. He is pursuing more midwifery group practices, which give women continuity of care with a known midwife.
On specialist access, the Minister pointed to the expanded Isolated Patients Travel and Accommodation Assistance Scheme (IPTAAS), though rising fuel costs and low awareness of the scheme remained live issues. He was candid that the program’s name itself was part of the problem and directly asked RDA representatives to help lift awareness of the scheme in their regions. He also backed continued expansion of virtual care, saying its clinical governance and speed of access to senior specialists had won him over. Virtual care, he said, is “here to stay”.
Pressure beyond the hospital walls
Minister Park said NSW Health was progressing the 44 recommendations of the parliamentary inquiry into rural, regional and remote health: “that doesn’t mean job done, it means work to do, but it means part of job done”.
He also raised the roughly 1,300 patients occupying NSW hospital beds while waiting for aged care or NDIS support, a pressure that hits smaller regional hospitals hardest through delayed discharges and bed block. As chair of the National Health Ministers’ meeting, he said the issue would again be on the agenda when ministers meet in coming weeks. He described the partnership with RDAs as crucial, giving government a “bird’s-eye view” of conditions on the ground.
