The report, titled ‘Diagnosing a rural doctor deficiency: symptoms of labour shortages in Shepparton general practice’, was prepared for Ms Sheed’s office in October 2021.
It said turnover of doctors and the difficulties faced by GPs had an impact on the lives of people from Shepparton.
“My initial thought was ‘my god this is awful’,” Ms Sheed said of reading the report.
“There’s been a shortage of GPs and doctors at the hospital for a long time, and GV Health has been quite public about that they’re short on staff and that has an impact on the way they do things and those issues are made worse by fewer GPs.”
She said one of the six recommendations made by the report, which involved changing Shepparton’s zoning to allow for more doctors, had been implemented by the Federal Government.
However, the other five recommendations will require long-term fixes and Ms Sheed said the scope of the problem was so large that it was hard to know where to begin in attracting more medical professionals to the region.
She said the Committee for Greater Shepparton and the city’s council were exploring how to attract more professionals to the city, but challenges like schooling, health and an unavailability of land and properties were causing large issues.
“There’s a bit of helplessness because of the recruitment issues,” she said.
“It’s been made worse during COVID because of the borders, but there needs to be more communication between the health networks and this might be an opportunity to work on it.”
The issues have also extended to Goulburn Valley Health, which in January said it was short some 150 full-time roles.
Executive director of medical services and chief medical officer at GV Health John Elcock said GV Health had found the last two years to be “a challenging time for recruitment and retention of healthcare staff”.
“The well-known difficulties in recruiting professionals to regional and rural areas have been exacerbated by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating increased demand for healthcare workers, including doctors, and yet reducing the numbers available to work,” he said.
“Currently some of our junior doctor positions have a 50 per cent vacancy rate, representing 80 full-time medical roles, so we are using locum doctors and working hard in Australia and overseas to recruit to those positions.”
Rural Doctors of Victoria president Rob Phair said the issue was linked to GV Health, adding the medical scene in Shepparton was “not a happy place”.
He said Shepparton had struggled to retain doctors for the past two decades.
“None of this is new,” he said.
“And as Code Brown ends and we come through the pandemic, we’ve got a fatigued workforce ... it makes it difficult for recruitment and retention.”
