POLITICIANS and bureaucrats need to adjust their economic mindset when it comes to funding health services, Federal Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care, Senator Anne Ruston, believes.
Speaking at Pharmacy Connect earlier this month, the newly appointed Shadow Minister said that while she did not have the answers to solve all the challenges facing the health sector, she wanted health practitioners to work to their full scope of practice.
"When you look at the massive size of our health bureaucracy, sector and health network, we really do need to look at how we can make sure that it is maximising and operating to its full capacity, and is working in its entirety to the extent of its scope of practice," she said.
"That it is operating as a united whole instead of a whole heap of sectors and silos that are not maximising integration and the outcomes for the patient.
"The economist in me is always looking at the economic solution, [and] I would've thought that a healthy economy would rely on a healthy population.
"Therefore, we should be looking at medicine as an input and an investment, not as a cost.
"If my assumptions so far in looking at how governments deal with many of the sectors of our health economy is [right] we look at it as a cost centre instead of looking at it as an investment, and that's where things like preventative health measures must form part of what we do in future."
Ruston told delegates that she wanted to engage with pharmacists to know how the sector can make a difference to improve universal access to healthcare.
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