Pakenham
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ASK NO QUESTIONS FLACK HELPS OUT Residents gagged over kinder questions R Gentlemen give help to war wounded PAGE 3 Wednesday, 23 August, 2017
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A Star News Group publication Phone: 5945 0666 Classifieds: 1300 666 808
Property listings... now with a View Gazette real estate sections will benefit from a new partnership with View.com.au as independent publishers join up with the property portal this week. View is the property insights site that offers a host of tools for consumers to research any property in Australia using the new Price Estimator feature on the website. The combination of strong property listing in both print and online makes for a powerful marketing platform for buyers,
vendors and agents. Readers will see digital and physical representation of the relationship across all of the group’s newspapers and other media assets including key publications in Star News Group, Mail News Group and Mornington Peninsula News Group. There will also be enhanced editorial content as part of the partnership that will allow view.com.au to provide up-to-date property insights and commentary that are invaluable to regional property investors.
Star News Group Managing Director Paul Thomas said he was excited to launch the partnership. “Our extensive portfolio of over 30 weekly and monthly newspapers, and their respective high-performing websites, are a vital part of the lives of consumers living in regional markets,” Mr Thomas said. “This partnership with view.com.au allows us to innovate, adapt and stay more relevant to the community we’ve been serving for over 150 years.” View.com.au is one of Australia’s
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com.au
com.au
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BRIMMING largest online property portals and the new partnership includes Independent regional and community publishers across Victoria, South Australia and Queensland.
Starting this week readers can expect to see the view.com.au brand reflected in real estate and property sections of Star News Group publications.
■ Sick people are clogging up hospitals…
Doctor distress By Bonny Burrows A shortage of doctors in Cardinia shire is leading to hospital emergency departments being jammed up with patients with minor illnesses. Startling statistics show that the area has the lowest percentage of GPs in the state. Data from Victorian Department of Health and the South Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Networks (SEMPHN) show that despite the shire exhibiting the “poorest health and social outcomes of any region in the SEMPHN’s catchment”, Cardinia has just 0.7 GPs per 1000 people. This places the shire within the bottom three for the state for GP numbers per capita. SEMPHN CEO Elizabeth Deveny said new growth areas such as Cardinia were underserved for GPs, dentists and allied health specialists. She said this led to an increase in hospital presentations, a claim supported by SEMPHN data which indicates 299 per 1000 Cardinia residents had presented to emergency departments during 2014-15 with non-emergency health concerns. “The distribution of the health workforce is significantly influenced by how established an area is, its socio-economic status and the proximity of public and private hospitals,” Ms Deveny said. “So local government areas with hospitals will have relatively high numbers of medical
Dr Filip Nikolic is speaking out about GP shortages in Cardinia shire. 172025
Picture: BONNY BURROWS
specialists, which is the case in the SEMPHN.” Pakenham Family Health Practice Manager Dr Filip Nikolic believes the staggering local
numbers - 15 per cent more than the Victorian average - were due to a shortage of full-time doctors at local clinics.
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He said on average, an annual presentation of 1500 to 2000 patients to a clinic provided the workload for one full-time doctor. “But I doubt if you look at Cardinia shire’s population numbers that there’s enough fulltime equivalent doctors,” Dr Nikolic said. The practitioner, who opened his familyoperated clinic in 2010, said this struggle to provide enough doctors to service the area was due to its booming population and medical registration requirements. “There seems to be quite a few medical centres around, but very few have a large number of full-time doctors,” Dr Nikolic said. The doctor said there were two kinds of clinics, both with their own sets of challenges limiting full-time GP numbers. He said the traditional small practices had one to three GPs who remain for a long time, but weren’t able to take on new patients due to size and time restraints. On the other end of the spectrum were the large corporate facilities, he said, which, while cost effective and time efficient, employed “transient” doctors from overseas who stayed for their mandatory 10 years to reskill in Australia and then moved on elsewhere - usually to start their own small practices. Dr Nikolic backs claims that limited doctor numbers were leading to an increase of ED presentations - something he strongly advises against.