Election 2020 - Party Policies - Health - Primary Care
25th Jul 20, 5:51am
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Primary Care
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- Improve community-based care by providing adequate funding that recognises the full operational and capital costs involved, promotes national consistency, integration and collaboration between agencies, and enables community-based governance structures.
- Reduce the need for expensive surgery, hospital care, diagnostic procedures and pharmaceuticals through prevention and early intervention.
- Review the funding formula for general practice teams to address the specific situation of practices looking after very high proportions of high needs populations.
- Encourage Primary Health Organisations and DHBs to provide out-of-hours clinics and ‘first-in-first-served’ processes, when required in particular communities.
- Reduce distorted demand for prescription pharmaceuticals by prohibiting direct-to-public marketing by drug companies.
- Read more here and here.
- Labour will lower the cost of GP visits by $10.
- Lowering the VLCA (Very Low Cost Access) fee cap by $10 to $8 for adults and $2 for teens (under 13s are already free), with a funding increase to VLCA practices to cover this.
- Increasing government funding for all practices that lower their fees by $10, lowering the average non-VLCA fee from $42 to $32 and the maximum fee from $69 to $59
- Increasing funding for GP training places, taking the intake to 300 per year
- Carrying out a review of primary care funding to further reduce barriers to primary care and ensure the financial sustainability of practices.
- Read more here.
- Free GP visits and prescriptions for under 13s.
- Make it easier for 600,000 low-income New Zealanders to visit their GP before a condition deteriorates by offering Community Services Card holders cheap GP visits capped at $18.
- Establish a national programme of primary care navigators.
- Invest so that every General Practice location can get a government funded primary care navigator.
- Read more here and here.
- Expand free dental care through a yearly free check-up, x-ray and clean for 18 - 25 year olds, Community Service Card holders and Super Gold Card Holders to halt preventable dental disease. This would be funded and provided at community based dental facilities rather than overloading hospital services
- Continue to implement certain recommendations of the Health and Disabilities System review except that halving the number of DHBs is not an adequate response to ensure equity of access for all New Zealanders without using poor Māori health statistics to advocate for separatism. New Zealand needs no more than 7 DHBs while having regard to the serious geographic isolation of the West Coast where a separate DHB is warranted. The remaining 6 DHBs should be population-related to the remainder of the South Island and for all the North Island.
- Engage with the sector stakeholders to ensure that a complete stocktake of paramedic equipment, staffing and services to ensure that they are fit for purpose across the country.
- Introduce top sliced funding for paramedic equipment and infrastructure to bring it up to an agreed standard for all regions. This includes the training and skill mixing of paramedics to provide a wider provision of first responder services across the country
- Allocate funding to settle longstanding paramedic pay disputes and also encourage paramedic training
- Expand the range of services delivered in general practice (including allied health and mental health services).
- Incentivise DHB and hospital-based services to support community medicine and general practice, which will facilitate the move to functioning as one system
- Rework the capitation model to reflect ethnicity, complexity, comorbidity, and age
- Discretionary DHB funding to be bulk funded with long-term certainty so practices can plan and direct services to the needs of their unique patient population, with a focus on proactive and long- term care.
- Ensure that the additional DHB funding announced in the 2020 Budget is, at a minimum, proportionally allocated to community based medical care
- Fund mobile health buses to take specialists and specialist services to the people
- Incentivise more General Practitioners to become Rural GPs by an adequately funded GP capitation formula that takes into account social determinants including rural isolation.
- DHB’s take responsibility to provide primary care staff (rather than just fund) for rural practices with staffing shortfalls with shared urban-rural GP’s.
- Fund capital development of community medical facilities and fund new technology within practices to facilitate virtual care.
- Universal vision screening by trained optometrists for year 5 and year 6 primary school students, and, for those who need it, a follow up full eye exam and to be fitted with glasses as required
- Provide mental health programme ‘Gumboot Friday’ with $10m over three years to go toward administering and delivering free counselling services for young people.
- Support ASH (Action for Smokefree 2025) in their policy to divert tobacco and cigarette smokers to much safer products, as in Japan, and stop attacking the low-incomed with exorbitant taxes ($2 billion) whilst claiming to support Smoke-Free by 2025.
- Read more here.
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