The Liberal Government is committed to fixing Tasmania’s health system and putting patients back at the forefront of every decision – where they belong. Today we have released a Green Paper on Delivering Safe and Sustainable Clinical Services in Tasmania as the next step in our One State, One Health System, Better Outcomes plan to rebuild essential services.

It’s time to shift the conversation to one about “access to better care”, rather than one about “better access to care”.

We’ve already started this process by merging the three THOs into one Tasmanian Health System from 1st July 2015, this Green Paper is the next step.

I want to be very clear that this process is not about the budget and it’s not about saving money. It’s about how we can deliver better health outcomes with the resources we have.

No hospitals will close and every community will have access to better care, regardless of where in Tasmania you live.

We will continue to heavily invest in the health system, but if we are to improve outcomes we must deal with the duplication and inefficiencies which are stopping us getting better outcomes for Tasmanians.
The previous Labor-Green government completely mismanaged the health system in Tasmania. The Green Paper shines a light on years of under-performance of the health system and asks hard questions about what health services we have, the workforce we need to deliver them, and where those services should be provided from.

We must use the resources and expertise we have available in health to deliver top-quality services.
The Green Paper starts the conversation with the community, clinicians and those who work in our health system on how we can improve.

We should be aiming for high-quality essential and emergency services to be delivered at a high-quality in each region. Equally, we must question whether complex, high risk services provided irregularly in multiple locations is safe or sustainable.

Central to our reform plans will be the development of a Clinical Services Profile that will describe where services can be located in a manner that all Tasmanians have equal and fair access to better services.

The Green Paper will guide a 10 week public, stakeholder and clinician consultation period for people to have their say. The feedback will be collected and considered before a final White Paper on health reform is released in March 2015, forming the basis of future action to fix the mess in the health system.
The Green paper is located at www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/onehealthsystem