We asked Jeremy Rockliff and Rebecca White how they planned to support healthcare workers. Video by Aaron Smith and Paul Scambler (17/3/24)
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00:00 Hi, my name's Craig Thompson. I'm the editor of the Launceston Examiner.
00:03 Today we continue our series of reader questions for the Premier and the Opposition Leader.
00:07 What policies and strategies will you put in place to improve staff availability at hospitals,
00:15 staff levels, to meet growing patient needs?
00:18 Well, when I look at where we've come from over the course of the last 10 years, we have two and
00:24 a half thousand more health professionals in and around hospitals and in regional Tasmania.
00:30 One thousand three hundred ninety more nurses. We're going to incentivise and continue that,
00:36 and it's part of our 2030 Strong Plan for Tasmania's future is ensuring we encourage
00:41 people from interstate, even overseas, but also encourage young people in Tasmania to take up
00:50 the profession of nursing, of mentioned doctors already in terms of that HEC support,
00:56 scholarships for nurses, those incentives, but also we've already got on the table
01:01 allied health scholarships as well to $25,000, which is bringing key personnel and professionals
01:13 in that allied health space from interstate, as well as encouraging local people as well
01:19 to boost that workforce. And so I'm very proud of where we've come from in terms of more paramedics,
01:26 more nurses, more doctors, more allied health professionals. And that's happened because of
01:30 our key investments and community paramedics I've mentioned before, 27 more around rural and
01:37 regional Tasmania. Paramedics, some 240 or 50 more paramedics and dispatch officers we've employed
01:46 over the course of the last 10 years, and there'll be more employed as well with our key commitments.
01:51 And so we're developing a health workforce. It's important to do so given the demand we're
01:56 experiencing. And I'm excited about where we've come from and we need to do more. I recognise that
02:02 we haven't solved all the challenges within our health system, but we are bringing fresh,
02:08 new ideas to the table as part of our 2030 Strong Plan for Tasmania's future.
02:15 We do have a big challenge and it's something that we've been thinking a lot about and we've
02:19 got some plans to start to address. We want to be able to support Tasmanians to go to university
02:24 here. We're offering 500 scholarships for Tasmanians every year to go to university
02:29 who can't currently afford to do that. From that, there will be opportunities for people to get
02:34 scholarships who want to do nursing. And then once they graduate, we want them to stay here and work
02:39 in Tasmania. So we're going to pay the HECS fees of people who agree to work in our health system
02:44 for three years. That's both nursing and midwives, allied health professionals, paramedics, making
02:50 sure that we train nurse practitioners here in Tasmania. These are the sorts of jobs that we
02:55 want to incentivise as a government to attract and retain good people here in Tasmania to undertake.
03:00 We're not going to do that unless we offer packages that are attractive. Otherwise,
03:05 we're going to lose them to the mainland. The other thing we'll do is provide opportunities
03:09 for 500 existing health workers to become permanent. A quarter of our health workforce
03:15 is on fixed-term contracts or casual. That means we're losing good people because they
03:19 haven't got job security. That's something we can start to address immediately once we're elected.
03:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]