Press conference in Fairfield, NSW

ANDREW COHEN: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andrew Cohen. I’m the CEO of ForHealth, and I’m standing with Dr [Indistinct], one of our urgent care clinicians, and we warmly welcome the Honourable David Saliba, our local state MP, Tu Le, the candidate for Fowler, and the Honourable Chris Bowen, the Federal Member here and also the Minister for Energy and Climate Change.

Before I begin, I just want to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Gadigal people, and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

ForHealth is the largest bulk billing general practice provider in the country. We serve more than 8 million patient visits every year nationwide. Our mission is about accessible universal health care, and we really focus on lower socioeconomic areas and more regional areas and areas like where we are today in Fairfield where, you know, household incomes are stretched and it’s really hard to find a doctor sometimes.

For communities like these I really want to thank the Albanese Government for cutting through the red tape of healthcare politics and really focusing back on patient access, first through the tripling of the bulk-billing incentive, which was the single largest investment in Medicare since its inception and has made a huge difference on the ground, but also as importantly in its investment in bulk billed urgent care services, like the one we’re at here today, which really allow a practice like ours to provide this community with almost instant access when they’ve got an urgent need, often late into the night. It also let us really help a secondary hospital system that is under immense pressure and doing tremendous work and needs support.

To give you a sense for what that means, you know, more than 50 per cent of our patients that go through existing urgent care centres state that they would otherwise have gone to an ED at the 20 times the cost. Also, when someone comes to an urgent care centre they’re normally, from the time they enter the centre to commence care, it can be usually within 20 to 30 minutes, which is a big difference for the community.

And finally, you know, you really know that these are delivering a good service when you look at the Google scores across established urgent care clinics, which are more than four and a half out of five stars, meaning that nine out of ten people that come in here rate if 5 out of 5, something that I’ve not seen in the publicly funded health system anywhere else.

So we are really excited to have an urgent care site here in the community of Fairfield. We’re really grateful for the investment and the vision to create it here. And I’m also really thankful to the South West Sydney PHN for all their hard work, their trust in us and their partnership in establishing this service today.

I’ll now hand to the Honourable Chris Bowen.

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, thanks, Andrew. It’s a great day for Fairfield. Of course, the Albanese Government is rolling urgent care clinics out across Australia for medical treatment which is urgent but not an emergency. And under the previous federal and state Liberal governments, our area – south-west Sydney – constantly missed out on government investments. That finished with the election of the Albanese and Minns Governments. The people of Fairfield, the people of south-western Sydney, will no longer be treated as second-class citizens without getting the investment they deserve.

And this urgent care clinic is so important in our community. It’s no secret that our community struggles with health challenges – some of the highest levels of diabetes in Australia, some of the highest levels of mental health challenges in Australia. And that means people need sometimes urgent medical assistance. And we know that Fairfield Hospital does a great job, but a great job under difficult circumstances. And if you go to the emergency department at Fairfield Hospital you can wait hours and hours for care.

We also know that 55 per cent of the people who present at the Fairfield Hospital emergency department aren’t actually in a medical emergency. They do need urgent care, but it’s not a medical emergency. That’s what urgent care clinics were designed for. When you need stitches, not surgery. When you need care which is really urgent but not a medical emergency.

I’ve had a little reminder myself over the last few days of when you can need urgent medical care, not an emergency but when you’re in a lot of pain and you need to see someone pretty quickly. And right across our community now this urgent care clinic, which will be open at the moment 8 till 8 but within a couple of weeks 8 till 10pm, is such an addition to peace of mind, particularly for young families – mums and dads with toddlers who might develop a fever or have a fall late at night or on the weekend, maybe not quite sure if they need to go to Fairfield Hospital, but to know that this urgent care clinic is open is such an addition to peace of mind.

So I want to thank ForHealth. It was only a couple of months ago – it seems like even less – that Minister Mark Butler and I stood right here and announced that Fairfield would get an urgent care clinic, and here we are. We said we’d try and do it before Christmas, and here we are declaring this urgent care clinic open for business. So it’s a big, big, good day for Fairfield.

I’m going to ask Dr Saliba to add a few remarks, and then I’ll come back and take questions.

DAVID SALIBA: Thank you. Thanks so much for that. This is absolutely amazing and it is such a welcome addition to Fairfield. Chris and I speak at length in terms of doing our absolute best to try to drive healthcare outcomes in our area. We’ve just recently committed in terms of the New South Wales Labor Government $550 million to upgrade Fairfield Hospital. And with this urgent care clinic here in Fairfield, it further bolsters the health care outcomes that our area needs, and that’s important because everyone deserves access to quality health care but also in a timely manner.

I really want to thank Chris and the federal government for coming to Fairfield’s aid, and I look forward to seeing so much more great things in the health care space in the years to come. Thank you.

CHRIS BOWEN: Okay, folks, over to you.

JOURNALIST: What does this centre cost to roll out?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, Andrew might want to talk about the actual costs for health, but it’s an investment. It’s an investment in this area. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s an investment well worth making. And if it cost millions of dollars, that’s a cost I’m very happy to justify on behalf of the people of Fairfield.

Andrew, do you want to add anything?

ANDREW COHEN: There is a little bit of blended funding needed because when you’re dealing with an urgent care case you’ve got higher consumables, you’re billing at a slower rate because you’re sort of spending a lot of time with the patients and you actually have higher staffing, you know, levels in terms of nursing and things like that. So, there is a little bit of funding required. Otherwise it is MBS – it is MBS funded.

JOURNALIST: So, while you’re there why do you need these? Why isn’t private practice or government hospitals [indistinct]? Why do we need this gap?

ANDREW COHEN: It’s pretty simple, like, there is obviously your doctors are getting scarcer and scarcer, and that’s something that means that it’s not always easy just to walk into a doctor appointment straight away and spend half an hour with a nurse and a doctor. That’s not something you can just walk into a general practice and do easily. And so what we really need is a service where people can walk in and get immediate care within a quick time frame without having to make an appointment and know that they’re going to get bulk billed. That’s going to be the difference between someone turning left or turning right towards the emergency department, and we know that when they go to the emergency department it costs the taxpayer 20 times more than if they’d gone to a general practice. And so anything we can do to triage those patients back into general practice by making it convenient, quicker, easier and open late is really important. It means that, you know, we’re better off economically but also patients are much better off in terms of [indistinct] and the time that they spend.

JOURNALIST: So local practice don’t have doctors, but you have doctors? I just don’t understand how that works.

ANDREW COHEN: Yeah, so I think local practices, you know, have many doctors, but what you can do with urgent care is one of the things that people may not understand about the system is that it’s actually the distribution of doctors that is very difficult. So you might go to Potts Point and find that you’ve got three doctors for every thousand people there but, you know, come here and you’ve only got, do you know, one doctor to every thousand people. So what urgent care allows us to do is actually to be able to kind of get doctors to come in for shifts at a centre like this and actually increase the workforce in the area, and they are usually attracted to that work because it is interesting work, a little bit like being in an emergency department. That really attracts GPs to these sites. Not all GPs, but some GPs. And it means that actually you can get the workforce into areas where otherwise that workforce wouldn’t be.

JOURNALIST: Thank you.

CHRIS BOWEN: Any other questions?

JOURNALIST: Minister, just wearing your other hat, how difficult will it be to work with America in regards to energy, in regards to changing, in regards to any of that?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, we’ll wait and see further announcements from President-Elect Trump, but I’ll be leaving later this week to lead the Australian delegation to COP29. And cooperation on climate is more important than ever before. Elections can change a lot of things. They can’t change this: global warming will continue. They can’t change the fundamental rules of economics that more renewable investment in Australia is a good thing for our economy. The right thing for the planet and a good thing for our economy. The cheapest form of energy ever known in history, and it is also a massive job creation opportunity for Australia. The world’s climate emergency is Australia’s jobs opportunity. No election overseas changes that fundamental point.

I note that the National Party today has called for a dropping of our net zero by 2050 commitment. Net zero is the bare minimum – the absolute minimum – that a country can do by 2050 to deal with climate change. The National Party was against net zero then for net zero, now they’re against it again. It just underlines you can’t trust the Coalition on climate, you can’t trust the Coalition on energy, and Peter Dutton would be a worse prime minister on climate than Scott Morrison or Tony Abbott were.

JOURNALIST: The – will you be able to use the G20 or APEC to be able to force across the line climate change to keep America on track?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, both of those meetings are important. The Prime Minister leaves tomorrow for APEC first then G20 and, of course, as you know, I’ll be leading the delegation to COP29. Of course climate and energy will be key matters on the Prime Minister’s agenda at both the APEC meeting in Peru and the G20 meeting in Brazil. That’s always been the case, and it will be the case this week.

JOURNALIST: But reasonable [indistinct] certainly hasn’t really spoken up climate change. Will it be difficult, as America is as big a power, economic power as it is to be able to maintain what we want to do?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, again, we’ll see what further announcements are from President-Elect Trump. But, the fact of the matter is Australia’s position has been and will be guided by our own national best interest. And our own national best interest means continuing the course, harnessing the opportunities that Australia has as the country with the best solar resources in the world and amongst the best wind resources in the world, harnessing those opportunities to create jobs and energy for the future. That remains the best interests of Australia and it remains what our government is 100 per cent committed to.

JOURNALIST: So your resolve is to maintain, say, the status quo?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, absolutely, because we were elected with a mandate of acting on climate change. Australia’s national economic best interests says we should act on climate change. We have a lot at stake. Australia is the developed country for which climate change would have the worst impacts, and we are the country with the best renewable resources in the world with a lot of job opportunities as we harness those renewable resources for our own domestic uses and to become a renewable energy export power as well.

JOURNALIST: Will President-Elect change in regards to higher inflation and slower economic growth for Australia?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, the Treasurer has outlined today his thoughts on the economic impact of tariffs. There are two impacts: there’s the direct impact of tariffs on Australia’s goods and there’s the impact on economic activity more broadly on Australia’s trading partners. The Treasurer has outlined his thoughts on that. I have nothing to add.