Super clinics won't ease emergency overload

Publicly, at least, the Rudd government has consistently claimed that federally funded super clinics are designed to boost the provision of GP services and take the pressure off dangerously overcrowded public hospitals.

The idea is that emergency departments will no longer be swamped by so-called GP-style patients with minor illnesses once a super clinic offering extended-hours services is established at a nearby location. Hence, Health Minister Nicola Roxon recently claimed the program already was helping to solve the hospital crisis, with a super clinic in Tasmania reportedly reducing by 13 per cent the number of people turning up at the nearby emergency department with minor illness.

This sounds impressive. But in reality this confirms how flawed the super clinics program is and how little pressure on hospitals they will relieve.

Several studies have found patients with a cold or sore toe constitute only 10 per cent to 15 per cent of total emergency presentations. But because GP-style patients suffer uncomplicated conditions, they are in fact quick, easy and cheap to treat in emergency departments. They account for a mere fraction, 2 per cent to 3 per cent, of the total workload and for about just 7 per cent of total costs.

Locating extended-hours GP clinics near emergency departments has been found to produce, at best, "an average reduction in attendances of one patient every two hours while the clinics are open". Not surprisingly, studies have also shown it is far cheaper to treat the few GP-style patients in emergency rather than incur the huge capital overheads of establishing stand-alone GP facilities.

The plan to divert GP-style patients into super clinics will therefore impose a huge cost on the federal budget, a cost that is difficult to justify given the insignificant effect super clinics will have on emergency workloads and costs.

But this isn't the half of it. Every credible study shows the critical national shortage of acute beds, not a lack of alternative GP services, is the real cause of the hospital crisis.

Lack of beds - public beds have been cut by two-thirds since 1983 - is the reason more than one-third of emergency patients requiring unplanned admission are forced to queue on trolleys in hospital corridors for more than eight hours before being admitted to a bed.

Regardless of the facts, the government seems hell-bent on proceeding with a planned roll-out of a 300-strong national network of super clinics.

Such waste of taxpayers' dollars on a non-solution for the hospital crisis is anything but an efficient and effective investment in sustainable and evidence-based health reform.

We are right, therefore, to suspect the ideological motives behind the super clinics program.

As the health debate heats up ahead of next year's federal election, super clinics will look increasingly like the anachronism they are.

Next year is shaping up as the year we finally get serious about structural reform of our public hospital system.