State and territory leaders today agreed to a three-year interim hospital funding deal to meet some of the shortfall left by the 2014 Commonwealth budget cuts.
Under the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreement, states will receive an additional A$2.9 billion from July 2017 to June 2020, with growth in Commonwealth funding capped at 6.5%. A longer-term arrangement will then be put in place.
In return, state and territory leaders agreed to improve the quality of health care to keep people out of hospitals and reduce the number of avoidable re-admissions.
The leaders supported the Commonwealth’s Health Care Homes trial, announced yesterday, which aims to better coordinate the care of people with chronic diseases.
But there was no consensus from the leaders on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s income proposal for states to levy their own income tax.
The Conversation’s experts respond.
Stephen Leeder, Emeritus Professor, Menzies Centre for Health Policy at the University of Sydney:
The agreement negotiated today should surprise no-one, as the cuts to health budgets proposed in 2014 were so absurd that they could not be taken seriously.
So now the states and territories will have the money to continue to meet basic needs for hospital services.
The commitment of the states and territories to improve the quality of their care is commendable. But I know of no Australian jurisdiction that has a strategic commitment to not improve quality or to feel fully satisfied with what they are doing.
Avoidable re-admissions make absolutely no sense to anyone, least of all the patients, so minimising these goes without saying also. The question is, “how?”
The interesting element in the agreement is the commitment to testing new ways of managing patients with complex and continuing illnesses. These programs of care will link up the services they require from hospitals, general practitioners and community services, as proposed by the Hambleton review of primary care.
There is evidence of benefit from similar trials to patients’ quality of life. This program has the capacity to improve care and decrease the need for hospital stays because crises in the lives of people with these problems can be prevented with good community support.
Let’s hope this trial gets a fair go.
Peter Sivey, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics and Finance, La Trobe University: