What’s more important than your health?

IT’S only when you have a stay in hospital, for something reasonably serious, that you realise how crucial it is that we have access to good health care, quickly.

And in general terms, we have excellent health services here in Australia, especially if you have the flexibility that private health cover allows, which can be a big ask at upwards of $50-a-week for a family.

However, while investment in bricks and mortar is important, and we’re looking forward to the promised $290 million stage two of the Wonthaggi Hospital, it’s much more important to have a good supply of well-trained doctors, specialists, clinical nurses and allied health professionals including physios, speech therapists, occupational therapists, rehab counselling, in-hospital pharmacists and all the rest.

But you have to wonder if there are enough of them to go around, especially in regional areas, as facilities are expanded, and if they are being properly paid and looked after in terms of conditions of employment.

And on that score, you’d have to say they aren’t being well enough paid for the crucial work they do.

There’s a position available this week, for example, for a ‘General Medical & Surgical Nurse’ at Bairnsdale Regional Health Service, being advertised at $75,000 p.a. full time.

Whereas the Bass Coast Shire has a job for a ‘Climate Emergency Project Officer’ at $90,772-a-year and South Gippsland Shire has a ‘Team Leader Customer Liaison’ position with a base salary of $90,631 plus superannuation.

A traffic controller working on the Melbourne Metropolitan Tunnel Project is paid $126,200-a-year.

And completely out of whack with what highly qualified nurses, and even specialist doctors are paid is what former Bass Coast Shire Council CEO Ali Wastie is getting in her first year as CEO at Geelong City, reportedly a salary of $543,000, rising to $620,000 by 2027-28. By comparison, the Australian Prime Minister only gets a base salary of $586,950.

How ridiculous is that?

No wonder then that fewer and fewer of our best and brightest, studying medicine at uni, are opting to go into general practice, where pay isn’t commensurate with the workload and level of responsibility.

Typically, our local GPs aren’t even keeping pace with what our second-tier shire managers are receiving.

As well as a need for a complete overhaul of public service salaries, including those in local government, there also needs to be a review of the system of band increases driving up salaries year-after-year at rates well above inflation.

Not only is it unsustainable, well beyond social norms.

It’s also important that the staffing of major new hospital projects, like the $223.5 million expansion of Latrobe Regional Hospital, are factored in to planning, and that they don’t suck needed health professionals away from surrounding regional areas once they get up and running.

It’s complicated, granted, but the day-to-day importance of properly resourced, efficiently operated and high-functioning health services must surely get the government’s highest priority – after all, we are literally nothing without our health.