Independent candidate for Mackellar Dr Sophie Scamps has revealed her health policy.
Dr Scamps (main image) spoke with the Northern Beaches Advocate at Mona Vale Hospital on Thursday (24 March) about her six-point health policy, which has been informed by her experience as a general practitioner (GP), both working in hospital and private practice.
Her six point health policy is:
- Enhancing pandemic and health emergency planning and responsiveness
- Preparing and responding to the health impacts of climate change
- Increasing health system and workforce capacity and support
- Expanding mental healthcare that is responsive to community needs
- Improving services and support for people with a disability and their carers
- Adequately resourcing aged care to support our most vulnerable
According to Dr Scamps, the health system was not adequately prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, especially GPs, who were left desperately short of personal protective equipment (PPE).
“Particularly when it [the COVID-19 pandemic] first started, it was quite clear that around the world we didn’t know what we were doing. There was no plan, there was no stockpile of protective equipment.
“As GPs, we were going down to the local hardware store and trying to find vacuum cleaner bags to try and find the filters, we were googling how to make our own protective equipment, there was a lot of fear,” said Dr Scamps.
In the health policy, Dr Scamps calls for a Royal Commission into the Government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which she believes will better prepare us for future pandemic responses.
“A major problem throughout the whole pandemic, which didn’t change, was the communication. The messages were changing constantly. There’d be an announcement to call your GP, but the GPs hadn’t been informed and we didn’t know about it.
“It’s looking at the preparedness, how we’re actually going to manage it and who’s in charge of that. One of the concerns I had was when we opened up rapidly with Omicron. That became more of a political decision than a health decision. They stopped listening to the health advice, that’s when the problems came in.
“It was over summer again, and particularly here in this electorate, the businesses had to close down again. That was the second time in a row and summer is their big time to make money. That hit them very hard. It was devastating for businesses locally,” explained Dr Scamps.
Asked about the intersection between climate change and health policy, Dr Scamps said that climate change had a direct impact on human health.
“The WHO [World Health Organisation] has called the climate crisis the greatest threat to human health. As a GP, I was working daily to look after the health and wellbeing of my patients and advocate for them.
“There’s thousands of people that are homeless now from the floods, that’s a huge impact on people’s mental health, personal health and hygiene. The other thing is the more extreme issues of food security and water security.
“Heat kills more people than any of the other natural disasters, it kills over 5k people a year in Australia. Then you’ve got particulate pollution as well from coal mines and other air pollution as well. There’s a recent study that came out that shows that on high air pollution days your cognition, your mental capacity, goes down.
“Smoke from the black summer bushfires killed hundreds of people because of respiratory conditions, but there was also an increase in the number of heart attacks and cardiovascular issues that happened as well. Heatstroke affects the vulnerable in our community, the elderly, the very young, and the disabled as well.
“As we’ve seen with Japanese encephalitis, there’s new tropical diseases. Things like Dengue fever and Ross River virus are all mosquito-borne, and none of them are pleasant,” said Dr Scamps.
In the wake of the pandemic, Dr Scamps is seeking improvements in the resilience and capacity of the healthcare system.
“I have worked at Mona Vale Hospital in the emergency department (ED), that actually worked well because that was well funded when I was working there. Prior to that, I worked in Westmead Hospital and it was very underfunded during the 1990s.
“I worked there quite a lot for a long while. You had people waiting forever. If people were going to be admitted, there’d be no beds for them to go to. Quite often what would happen is they’d stay on a trolley bed in the corridors in the emergency department.
“The number of beds in hospitals is not keeping up with the population growth, or the fact that there’s an ageing population as well. The majority of people who are admitted to hospital are more elderly people because they’ve got the chronic and complex diseases.
“There is still issues. The situation is getting worse with beds again over the last five years. And then we’ve been talking to a number of the nurses locally. Their main issue is their pay and how they’re valued but also, they don’t feel it’s safe for their patients.
“They feel it’s unsafe, that the level of care that they’re able to provide, because of the number of nurses to patient ratio and also the nursing expertise as well.
“It is projected by 2025, that there will be a shortage of nearly 110k nurses. There’s a shortage of around 3k doctors as well. That’s not taking into account aged care.
“People in Mackellar have very limited access to public outpatient services on the Northern Beaches. This means in many circ*mstances only private options are available, which can lead to significant out of pocket expenses. Public outpatient services on the Northern Beaches need to be expanded to ensure the Mackellar community has access to universal public specialist care,” said Dr Scamps.
Addressing adolescent mental health is also on Dr Scamps agenda, with a plan to put a counsellor in every school and an inpatient mental health facility on the Northern Beaches.
Asked whether enough skilled mental health practitioners were available to put one in every school, Dr Scamps said training would need to be ramped up.
“No, there’s not [enough], we need to expand. It needs to be massively expanded, almost double from what it is now. As a GP, trying to get people in to see a psychiatrist or even a psychologist, I would spend my lunchtimes ringing around on their behalf.
“We as GPs are looking after more and more complex cases of mental health that normally we have always been advised to send them off to see a psychiatrist for that specialist care, particularly when you need medication. It takes up a lot of a GPs time, because it’s very complicated. You’re not able to see your other patients who’ve got their own complex needs.
“Acute care is under pressure in the hospitals and with GPS as well, so chronic care is what’s missing out. In this area, because we’ve got a public-private hospital, we don’t have the public outpatient services that exist in other areas of Sydney,” said Dr Scamps.
Her policy announcement calls for an adolescent mental health inpatient facility on the Northern Beaches, but Dr Scamps refused to be drawn on where it should be located.
“It’s a good question. I don’t have it 100 percent answered, it would have to be decided in consultation with the hospitals and the experts,” she said.
Dr Scamps personal experience with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has guided her position on streamlining NDIS services and communication with GPs.
“There’s very little communication between the NDIS and the GPs. I have a child myself who’s on the NDIS and I know that it’s a fairly complicated process. They’re trying to make it less complicated for users to navigate.
“This is another experience the GPs in my practice and I have. They [patients] come back and the package they have from the NDIS is not what they need. If there was more communication between the caseworkers and the GPs, it will work a lot more efficiently,” said Dr Scamps.
As a GP and former ED doctor, healthcare is Dr Scamps first policy announcement. Her full six-point policy document can be read here.
Images: Northern Beaches Advocate, Envato
