Australian Health Ministers’ Conference Communique

February 29 2008

Today’s breakthrough meeting of Australian Health Ministers agreed on the need for reciprocal public performance reporting, as well as priorities for immediate reform.

For the first time, this will mean the Commonwealth and State and Territory governments have agreed on building and reporting a comprehensive set of performance measures across the entire health system.

For example, this will include hospital performance reporting and measures of access to GPs by region. This will build on existing performance requirements.

Today’s Australian Health Ministers Conference also decided on a range of issues that should be included under a new Australian Health Care Agreement.

Those areas will focus on taking pressure off hospitals by keeping people well and avoiding hospital admissions. The key elements of health reform to be dealt with by the AHCA are how to bring together the various aspects of the system to ensure coordination of services to deliver effective and efficient health care.

At the last meeting of AHMC, all Health Ministers agreed that the next AHCA needed to be expanded beyond public hospitals to deliver the major reform that is needed.

Today’s meeting identified the areas for immediate focus by the Health Ministers:

• Improving the experience for people using health services.
• Bringing the different aspects of the system together so that hospitals, ambulatory care, primary health care and care in the community have clear funding, role delineations, paths of engagement and transition and are able to continually improve their use both of the workforce and technology,
• Building new models of care based on the patient experience that specifically improve the speed of response to conditions arising from the ageing population, chronic disease and long term conditions,
• Focusing the system on prevention.
• Expanding services and support for mothers and young children.
• Better services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
• Building the health workforce we need for the future.
• Developing the next generation of leaders to drive health system reform into the future.

Ministers also discussed national registration, and agreed on the need to take urgent action. Ministers agreed to write to the Prime Minister as Chair of COAG seeking finalisation of the national scheme.

Ministers agreed that today’s decisions will go a long way towards building a more patient-focused health system, with real results for working families. There was a recognition that these decisions were not possible under the previous Commonwealth Government.

Media contact:

Joshua Cooney, Queensland Minister Stephen Robertson’s (Chair) office 0409 069 056;

Sean Kelly, Commonwealth Minister Nicola Roxon’s office 0417 108 362