After hours medical centre set to close

The Woy Woy After Hours Medical Service, which has been providing GP services on weeknights and weekends for more than 50 years, is preparing to close its doors for the last time.

The service has been caught up in a funding crisis which is threatening after hours clinics across the Central Coast.

Dr Paul Duff, who has been the co-ordinator of the service for the past 25 years, said that unless a solution can be found, the service will have to close by the end of August.

“It’s terribly sad but emblematic of the troubles facing general practice,” Duff said.

“Providing after hours care has always been regarded as a vital part of what GPs do but it has never been profitable.

“For decades our not-for-profit service has been dependent on government funding, a dependency that has become greater and greater as the Medicare rebate has fallen further and further behind the cost of providing the service.”

Duff said he had been economising and cutting back to run the leanest service possible.

“We have been lucky to have had the support of one particularly dedicated volunteer, without whom we would have been lost,” he said.

“Even so, a reduction in our funding a couple of years ago has meant the service has been going backwards, only surviving by eating into contingency savings built up over many years.

“We have been telling the people who hold the purse strings for at least the last 12 months that the current situation is unsustainable.

“My understanding is that the funding being offered is not increasing at all and with the skyrocketing costs of insurances, software licences and wages we have no chance of making ends meet.”

Duff said he understood negotiations between the services fund holder, Coast and Country Primary Care, and the Hunter New England Central Coast Primary Health Network (which distributes funds on behalf of the Federal Government), have come to a standstill.

“It’s not just us caught up in this,” he said.

“The Bridges After Hours Services at Erina and Kanwal are in the same position we are.

“Unless extra funding can be found I can see no future for any of us.”

The Woy Woy After Hours Medical Service was established in 1972 when Woy Woy Hospital first opened.

It is a cooperative of local GPs who take turns to staff evening and weekend clinics and be on call overnight.

In a general practice landscape where bulk billing is becoming less common, the service almost universally continues to bulk bill.

“We don’t pretend to provide the continuity of care you would get from your usual GP,” Duff said.

“As a cooperative we don’t want to compete with GPs in the area and don’t try to offer many of the services that they do, like specialist referrals, pathology or x-ray requests or long term prescriptions.

“The vital service that we do offer is to ensure that the people of the Woy Woy peninsula can be looked after when they can’t see their usual GP without having to resort to a long drive and extended wait at Gosford Hospital Accident and Emergency.

“I think we will be missed.”

If the funding of the service cannot be secured in the next couple of weeks the service expects to see its last patient on Thursday, August 31.

Source:
Woy Woy After Hours Medical Service