THE Great South Coast Medicare Local (GSCML) group will partner with international health provider Aspen Medical in a bid to operate the new primary health network that will service western Victoria from July.
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The GSCML/Aspen partnership will vie with a rival bid by the Grampians and Barwon Medicare Local groups to service the new network, which will cover the merged Great South Coast, Barwon and Grampians Medicare Local areas.
GSCML split from the Barwon and Grampians bid last year because it feared it would be too Geelong-centric and that health services to rural areas would suffer.
Aspen Medical is an Australian-owned provider of health care throughout Australia and overseas, including an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone.
GSCML chief executive officer Glenda Stanislaw said Aspen’s experience in providing health care to rural and remote communities was among the reasons it had been chosen as a partner.
Ms Stanislaw said while a consortium of the three existing Medicare Locals presently serving the region area would appear to be the logical way to bid, the much larger geographic area of the new network posed “significant challenges of scale and distance”. Those challenges were coupled with the federal government’s clear directive for the new PHN to rationalise administrative costs and focus on ‘frontline’ services, Ms Stanislaw said.
She said the GSCML/Aspen partnership would service a PHN area that stretched from Geelong in the east to the South Australian border, and as far north as Warracknabeal. It would include the regional centres of Warrnambool, Colac, Portland, Hamilton, Ballarat, Maryborough, Stawell, Horsham and Ararat, as well as many smaller rural communities.
“A PHN will purchase health services, rather than provide them directly, so partnering with a national organisation who also has extensive experience in this model, coupled with GSCML’s local knowledge and relationships, can provide high-quality outcomes with significant economies of scale,” Ms Stanislaw said.
The tender process to service the new PHN closes on January 27. It is expected the second quarter of 2015 will be used to transition from Medicare Locals to networks to ensure continuity of service.
Medicare Locals were set up in 2011 by the Rudd Labor government to fill gaps in health services.
The Abbott government last year decided to merge the 61 Medicare Locals into 30 PHNs to create cost-saving efficiencies.
