Vote 1
Jonathan Hippisley
for
Nedlands
(Independent)
Policy Platform:
Health
For me personally, the COVID crisis provided a good litmus test on which countries had a good health system and which didn’t,
and I thought Australia came out of it pretty well. I’m not going to cite numbers to support that, but at the time, as I
was perusing the death rates in different countries, I was proud to be an Australian, and very happy to live here.
So my policy position on health is that we have a pretty good health system, we need to acknowledge that, but we also need
to address what needs fixing before it starts to fray at the edges.
Shortage of GPs
The State Government needs to carry out an enquiry on why there is a shortage of GPs. Are the medical schools not
training enough doctors? If so, is that because they don’t have enough applicants, or is it because they don’t
have the capacity to train as many doctors as we need. If they don’t have enough applicants, the government should
open up more places to overseas students. And if they don’t have the capacity, the government should do what is
necessary to fix that.
Trainee doctors should be surveyed to ascertain why so few of them choose to become GPs and they should be asked
what could be done to fix that. Incentive schemes should be considered.
Nursing
Both my wife and my sister are nurses and I have served on a Local Health Advisory Group (LHAG) so I have some feel
for the concerns of nurses at both the coalface and the management level.
- Pay: While nurses feel underpaid and resent the erosion of their real wage, those I have talked with do
not cite this as a reason for wanting to leave; so while some correction for inflation may be called for, there are other
important issues.
- Award Consistency: There are different awards for different types of nurse, such as enrolled and registered,
and within these awards there is further differentiation between indigenous and non-indigenous nurses, and they
all have their own rules on overtime rates. This is inherently unfair, and it leads to confusion and mistakes in
payroll offices, so nurses, exhausted after a long shift have to sit up late checking for and seeking correction
to errors on their payslips. The overtime rules should be clear, concise and applied equally across all styles of nurses.
- Staffing levels and equipment should be adequate to protect nurses from injury and to avoid overtiredness.
- Training institutions should be surveyed to ascertain whether and why nursing enrolments are dropping,
and they should be consulted on how to fix this.
- Students from overseas should be offered pathways into employment and permanent residency in professions such
as nursing, where there is a critical shortage of staff. This could increase the supply of Australian trained nurses
and reduce the need to bring in as many nurses trained overseas.
Policy Platform for 2025 WA State Election
Authorised by J Hippisley, 11 Ashton Street, Quairading WA 6383