New England political leaders look for healthcare fix after changes to GP clinics

"We didn't fix it," he said.

The New England's health crisis was thrown into turmoil this week, after the state's largest charitable provider of primary health care services to rural communities announced it would be pulling out of five medical clinics, including in Bingara and Tenterfield.

Citing the "chronic shortage of permanent rural GPs, and the escalating cost of locum coverage" to explain their withdrawal, the Rural and Remote Medical Services (RARMS) Limited announced they would leave the clinics by September.

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Local political leaders said it was time to find a fix for the primary health crisis.

Member for Parkes Mark Coulton was minister for regional health during the previous government.

Holding the state's biggest electorate, which contains some of the state's poorest and least healthy communities, he is more aware than most of the cost of poor primary healthcare.

"I, quite frankly, am disappointed in what RARMS have done," he said.

"I've been speaking to the councils in my electorate and they are looking at other ways around, how they can continue to keep those services in town."

Mr Coulton said the rural GP crisis was not a new problem, with general practice continuing to decline in popularity for graduates just one of many issues.

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He said the rural medical schools the Nationals opened in government will help, but only once they can graduate students in a decade or so.

One policy reform that will hinder efforts: recent changes to the system setting priority areas for overseas trained doctors which put rural and remote areas on a level playing field for medical staff with metropolitan areas like Canberra, Wollongong and Hobart.

"The first thing the new government did was change the position priority area!" he said.

"Now Bingara, Gilgandra and Warren are competing with suburbs of Melbourne, Wollongong and Newcastle. Quite frankly I couldn't believe it.

"This change has already started to see a drift of doctors back [to the city]."

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Assistant minister for rural and regional health, Emma McBride, defended the government's decision.

She said the previous government had "arbitrarily axed" the ability of a long list of communities to recruit overseas trained doctors to fill gaps in general practice, in 2018.

"Labor initiated a senate inquiry into GP shortages in the last Parliament and it heard mountains of evidence from people who couldn't get in to see a GP, practices that were forced to close their books and doctors who were exhausted," she said.

The government has deliberately maintained financial incentives that pay doctors as much as $60,000 a year for working in remote Australia, she said.

The government also plans to spend almost a billion investing in general practice and strengthening Medicare, she said.

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce hopes to be able to find a bipartisan fix for the growing problem, compromising with the new Labor government.

"Hopefully, this is something that we can agree on," he said.

"I've already started having meetings with Labor ministers, on behalf of the people of New England, because that's your job, as they used to have meetings with me."

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