Australia’s public hospitals are under pressure and the Coalition will act to address the immediate problem by delivering more beds, not more bureaucrats.

The Coalition will deliver a $3.6 billion ‘beds and boards’ policy on public hospitals that will make a difference by directly tying increased funding to the delivery of more services. We will reduce centralised bureaucracy and allow hospitals to better respond to the needs of patients and hospital staff.

Community-controlled public hospitals are essential to ensuring that the needs of patients and staff are adequately met. The Coalition will provide $90.7 million over four years towards the establishment and operation of a community controlled public hospitals.

Local citizens, doctors and nurses are best placed to ensure their local hospital management is responsive and accountable. Community boards should include prominent community representatives with financial and management expertise as well as senior hospital representatives of the medical, nursing and allied health fields.

The board will appoint the hospital CEO. With the CEO, the board will set and manage the hospital budget. Each major referral hospital and its associated hospitals should have its own board. The board structure would be implemented over the course of the current Australian Health Care Agreement. A Coalition Government will make the implementation of public hospital boards a condition of Federal hospital funding.

A Coalition Government will provide a transparent, certain and sustainable funding model for our public hospitals. Commencing with the next round of Australian Health Care Agreements in 2014, the Coalition will commit to a set proportion of the efficient cost of public hospital services without any claw-back of GST revenue.

The proportion will be determined by the Federal government’s share of public hospital funding at the time of implementation. It is anticipated that this will be around 40 per cent of the share of total public hospital funding. In the future, the Coalition would be prepared to move to a higher percentage of funding, including 100 per cent of the efficient price, but only if the relevant state government agrees to surrender an appropriate percentage of its GST revenue.

The Coalition will support a transition to casemix funding for the commencement of the new funding model. This model puts a price on each procedure, treatment or service performed in hospitals and will be determined in consultation with the States and Territories through the Grants Commission.

Rural and small hospitals will receive appropriate funding grants to ensure their ongoing viability. Our model will also cover funding for research and training in public hospitals funded by State Governments and the user cost of capital.

Longer term, the objective is to rely on local management and activity-based funding rather than the centralised control that has been standard practice in New South Wales and Queensland.

The Coalition will provide funding of $3.1 billion for 2,800 new public hospital beds over the next four years. Waiting times in emergency departments and for elective surgery are too long. This is because there aren’t enough hospital beds.

Our commitment is to deliver 1,500 more beds than under the Rudd-Gillard Government’s National Health and Hospital Networks plan and will go a long way towards meeting the AMA’s 85 per cent occupancy benchmarks.

Funding for these additional beds will be contingent upon the States and Territories providing evidence that these beds have opened.

This commitment to 2,800 beds includes our previous announcement of $832 million for 800 sub-acute and acute mental health beds.

Our public hospitals require a strong nursing profession.

The Coalition will support a range of measures to support their professional development. These include:

- Funding of $150 million over four years to establish the Nursing Professional Development Fund. This fund will provide support for nurses to improve their skills, participate in short courses and attend professional conferences. Access to the fund will be available to all registered and enrolled nurses.

- An annual $10,000 bonus for up to 300 nurse practitioners working in remote communities that have no resident medical practitioner. We will provide funding of $12 million over four years for this initiative.

- An additional 100 scholarships for rural and regional nurse practitioners. The Government currently funds $15,500 per annum for two years full-time study or the part-time equivalent. This will cost $3.1 million over four years.

The Coalition will also provide funding of $200 million over four years to support leading health and medical research. We will work with researchers to determine research area priorities and develop a new funding structure that appropriately indexes funding.

The Coalition will also provide $2 million for an information and compliance campaign to improve rates of Informed Financial Consent, to be co-funded with the private health industry.

The Rudd-Gillard Government has talked a lot, but done very little to improve health and hospital services. The ill-conceived National Health and Hospitals Reform Plan will not address the serious problems in our public hospitals. Instead of increasing bed numbers, Labor will increase the health bureaucracy.