It will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Formal submission have closed but if you get something in quick (and concise) they may still look at it. They have also been out and about consulting with the community.

I am not connected to the Commission but they are an impressive group of people given a very wide scope.

The proof of the pudding will be in their final report due mid next year and more importantly what the Government does with it.

The Government is also reviewing primary care and mental health and has established reviews in this area. It is not a bad thing to do your homework before making substantive changes to a finely balanced (and struggling) system to make sure you “do no harm” and end up making things worse rather than better. As with the Reform Commission, the time for judgements will be when the homework is handed in.

I’m not sure – I could find out.

Most of these things will take almost any submission even if they haven’t called for it. If it isn’t clear what to do its a good idea to send a one or two page sheet with succinct points and give a contact address etc in case they find your particular submission so unique, brilliant and relevant they are amazed they have never heard the idea before and/or they are interested in detail on your (and others) general themes.

Even long tinfoil hat blog type rants often get acknowledged in the appendices [great for ego - "the orgon field magnetic effect as I noted in the Great Tea Trolley Disaster Inquiry of 2006 by Prime Minister and Cabinet"] but if you want to have any effect short is more likely to get read.

I’ve no doubt that individual hospitals are doing good things. Indeed, our life expectancy keeps going up, so the health system must be doing something right…

Toowoomba Base Hospital reported its excellent (and widely lauded) progress in The Chronicle, but this certainly was not picked up by the state/ national press; although I’m sure that, had the report been negative not positive, it would have been all over The Courier Mail. Fine public hospitals are not what CM wants to acknowledge publicly!

Reading the report, I wondered how many other hospitals are also reporting excellent results which, at best, get no further than local papers.

Do you know if they’ve formally asked for submissions anywhere?

Part of the reason these things proceed slowly is that after the 20 second news grabs and simple rhetoric from politicians someone has to do the hard work and get down to finding out what is actually going on as opposed to what pollies in election mode allege is going on. More often than not there is a wide gap.

Despite the spin I can’t see the 31 new GP superclinics doing much more than poaching GPs from existing services.