Seven lessons for Australia's health system from the coronavirus upheaval

The COVID-19 pandemic forced us all to change the way of life we live. The lockdown emended fundamental aspects of our lives, non only to protect our have health merely also the health and lives of others.

Even as Australians have shown a remarkable ability to adjust to a existence with COVID-19, then too has Australia's health system. In a new written report, the Grattan Institute outlines vii Florida key lessons that can help make the health system more effective, efficient and equitable, and fitter able to deal with forthcoming crises.

Lesson 1: telehealth kit and boodle

Since middle-March, Australians have been fit to refer their GP or a specialist from the comfort of their own homes, via phone or video (known as telehealth). Although face-to-nerve consultations are sometimes still necessary, the pandemic has shown the enormous potential for telehealth to provide more efficient care in many instances, such as for routine appointments or mental checkup-ups.

During the epidemic, telehealth was a no-brainer to protect patients and health professionals from getting sick or making others sick. Only given its general adoption and success, it is also a no-brainer for telehealth to become a permanent fixture of healthcare in Australia.

The federal government should revisal the temporary telehealth Medicare items to ensure they promote persistence of care and make them more right for the longer term, couple them with e-referrals (to substitute the museum-ERA fax machines), and introduce rules to keep rorting.

Aboard telehealth, the pandemic prompted a fast expansion of hospital-in-the-home worry, including new "virtual hospitals". Many people with degenerative wellness conditions, or who are in rehabilitation or residential aged fear, can be monitored by wellness professionals and disposed health advice without face-to-present contact lens, victimization technologies such as telemonitoring.

Republic and state governments should fund further expansion of these services.

Lesson 3: Australia needs new financing arrangements for general-purpose practices

Australia's rigid primary care funding mock up, in which doctors are reply-paid on a bung-for-service basis, made it ossified for GPs to set up new practice models during the pandemic – such As quickly establishing COVID-19 examination clinics or making outreach calls to vulnerable patients.

Governments should take off barriers in the Medicare system to allow contrary models of care.

Moral 4: public and private systems should be more than integrated

The general showed the potential for exoteric and private health-deal systems to work better together. Private hospitals were nonmoving equal to deal with the run over from potentially overwhelmed public hospitals. At the same prison term, private hospitals in effect came to a halt when governments delayed non-urgent elective surgeries, to free up resources to undertake the epidemic.

Straightaway there is a huge backlog of patients who need elective surgeries. Clearing this stockpile should not exist a business-as-usual matter. The pandemic provides an opportunity for Australia to move away from the current inconsistent wait-number process, to a standardised, efficient, equitable process with a single wait-inclination antecedency system to properly contend elective surgeries.

State governments should also consider negotiating semipermanent contracts with backstage hospitals for extra help.

Lesson 5: on that point are gaps in Australia's pandemic preparedness

Contempt Commonwealth of Australi's largely successful answer to the pandemic, our preparedness regime was not entirely up to expunge. Commonwealth of Australi had not contemplated a crisis of this scale, and as a consequence the early response was characterised by reactive political and interracial messages to the public.

Future pandemic preparation should admit a workforce strategy to support the rapid expansion of wellness-care capacity; provide a national surveillance access to quick and accurate reporting of disease data; and ascertain that incident wellness effects such as mental wellness problems and domestic violence are reinforced into the plan and managed in the longer term.

Object lesson 6: the health system needs a stronger supply chain

During the epidemic, wellness workers had to cope with inadequate supplies of testing kits and personal preventative equipment (PPE) such as face masks. Problems with Australia's supply chains hampered ready access to supplies, and the global surge in demand forced Australian health departments to join the global bidding for fast-tracked supplies from overseas.

Australian governments need to strengthen local supply chains, away drawing on a diverse rigid of suppliers and increasing product standardisation to enable easier substitution of products. The National Medical Stockpile also needs to be reviewed, because it did not have sufficient supplies.

Object lesson 7: Commonwealth and state governments give the axe advisable coordinate primary aid

The macrocosm of the National Cabinet improved national coordination in response to the pandemic, American Samoa the old fractured Federal relationships were temporarily set aside.

Revived cooperation through primary guardianship agreements, and strengthened Primary Health Networks, could reduce – or, better still, end – the overlap in services provided by the Commonwealth and states, and improve primary care delivery.

The new normal can be better than the cold

Australia's health care must not "snap rachis" to the honest-to-goodness order. The general has shown us a better right smart. Nowadays reform is necessary to transmute these temporary improvements into long-handled-term successes.

Merely reform and a "untried normal" won't just happen mechanically. Consumers and clinicians should be engaged now to body-build on what went well during the epidemic, to assure our health organization is fitter than IT ever was before the pandemic.

AwayStephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute and Anika Stobart, Associate, Grattan Institute.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons certify. Read the avant-garde article.

Double: SilviaJansen, iStock.

https://hellocare.com.au/7-lessons-australias-health-system-coronavirus-upheaval/

Source: https://hellocare.com.au/7-lessons-australias-health-system-coronavirus-upheaval/

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