Medicare locals: 'their days are numbered'

Member for the Mining and Pastoral Region Stephen Dawson has expressed disappointment over comments from a peak medical body calling on the Federal Government to scrap Medicare Locals.

Australian Medical Association WA vice-president Michael Gannon argued MLs were a political ploy of the previous Federal Labor Government, with virtually no relationship to medicine, general practice or patient care.

"All Medicare Local accounts should be frozen, any planned staff hiring cancelled, their publicity campaigns brought to an end and all Medicare Locals be told that their days are numbered," he said.

"Most MLs have many millions of dollars in their bank accounts and there is evidence that they have salted away cash with little or no oversight.

"We have talked about this issue for too long."

Dr Gannon acknowledged that there were a handful of projects that had been effective but suggested these did not require the "heavy-handed bureaucratic infrastructure that had become MLs".

Mr Dawson said the AMA never liked Medicare Locals despite their begrudging acknowledgment that some projects in WA had been effective.

"I'm disappointed by the WA AMA's calls on the Federal Government to scrap Medicare Locals," he said. "Medicare Locals were created to improve vaccination rates, co-ordinate after-hours access to GPs and prevent hospitalisations.

"The Kimberley-Pilbara Medicare Local was established to deliver locally planned, co-ordinated and implemented medical services."

He said before the KPML began, bureaucrats in Canberra decided what medical services were needed in the Pilbara and Kimberley and "we had little or no local input".

Mr Dawson said he hoped Tony Abbott's promise in August last year not to shut Medicare Locals would be upheld.