For a shift away from Business to Bureaucracy:
http://www.australiandoctor.com.au/news ... yODQxNzAS1This may not let you in without a password so I quote:
A $25 million super clinic in Adelaide’s south is being staffed by GPs from a practice less than 2km down the road who drive between the two centres to see patients. The revelation is the latest embarrassing development in the Federal Government’s $650 million super clinic policy, now being formally investigated by the Auditor General. Christies Beach Medical Centre has been providing GP services at the GP Plus Super Clinic in Noarlunga for the past two months, running it as a branch practice. The rate at which it is renting the rooms is confidential.
Australian Doctor tried to contact the practice manager, but was told she was in the car, driving between the clinics.
When practice principal Dr Barry Dowell returned our calls, he agreed that although the town had a “nice new building”, it had “no extra doctors” and no extra capacity to see patients. “The view is that we will be able to recruit extra doctors because we will now have new rooms at the super clinic,” he said, adding there was a desperate need for new doctors in the area. “At the moment we are spreading ourselves around to try and get this up and running,” he said, with the practice’s 12 FTE GPs each doing a few days’ work at the super clinic every week.
But Dr Dowell admitted that part of the reason his practice put in a bid to run GP services at the clinic was to minimise the business threat of the super clinic, less than a four-minute drive away. “Had we lost the bid, the super clinic was potentially a threat to our business. I don’t know how big a threat, but it was very much on our minds in deciding to bid,” he said.
Asked whether Dr Dowell is a true believer in the super clinics, he said: “The government has built a very nice building and it is now up to the local service to use those facilities well … Time will tell if it is a good use of government money.”
Last week the Auditor General announced it would assess the Department of Health and Ageing’s management of the super clinic program — widely considered the government’s flagship primary care reform, but one that has been dogged by problems. It is also expected the audit office will examine the tender process for contracts to build clinics. There have been long-running allegations that clinic locations were chosen by Labor officials to boost the party’s popularity in key electoral seats. The health department has acknowledged it had no hand in the decision-making.
The announcement of an audit report comes in the wake of a series of high-profile failures, including the collapse of a planned super clinic in Sorell, Tasmania at a cost of $500,000, and the decision to scrap a super clinic in Darwin because no one had made a bid to build it.
Last year, the government was forced to launch a $3.2 million bailout of the Redcliffe clinic in Queensland.
Earlier this year, a company called gpSolutions, which operates the Modbury super clinic in Adelaide, walked away from its contract after struggling to find enough GPs to staff it. At a cost of $25 million, Modbury is the most expensive super clinic in Australia.
The government also stripped $44 million out of the super clinics program in its latest budget, but without taking a single cent away from any of the clinics.
According to budget papers, the money was for “development, networking and other operational activities”, which will now be left to the Medicare Locals network.
The audit report will be tabled in Parliament next April.
AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton said super clinics were a failed initiative in concept, design and implementation, and that a proper audit was overdue.
Super clinic casualties:
Scrapped: Sorrell, Tasmania
Scrapped: Darwin, Northern Territories
Bailed out: Redcliffe, Queensland
Abandoned by service provider: Modbury, South Australia