The Regional Australia Institute (RAI) recently released its Pillars of Communities report which measured the number of service delivery professionals over a period of 30 years, recording the number of professionals in small towns in 1981 and again in 2011. Overall the report shows that rates of access to doctors and nurses in small towns has improved slightly in that period, but access to dentists and social welfare professionals has worsened significantly.
Small towns are identified as communities outside of metropolitan areas with a population of 200 to 5,000 people. Around 1.8 million people, or 8.5 percent of the total population, live in small towns across Australia. People living in small towns experience lower life expectancy and higher rates of disease and injury than people in urban areas. In 2011 there were 1,555 small towns in Australia. According to the Pillars of Communities report inner regional areas fared better in terms of growth of services, growing by 85 percent compared to growth of only seven per cent for small towns in remote and very remote areas.
General Practitioners score a ‘B’ in Small Towns Report Card
Selected professional occupations looked at in the Pillars of Communities report included GPs, nurses, health specialists, teachers, and police officers. Such professional services were then graded A – F based on access over the period tracked.
The Regional Australia Institute’s Small Towns Report Card shows that 18 percent of small towns had a general practitioner in 2011, an increase on 14 percent in 1981. This is an additional 1,000 GPs, a figure that led to a score grade B on the RAI’s Small Towns Report Card. Small towns are more than ten times more likely to have a nurse than a GP. Numbers of small towns with nurses remained stable at 78 percent, however only 6 percent of small towns had access to a psychologist and even lower rates of access to a dentist.
The number of GPs in small towns is 83 doctors per 100,000 people, well below half the national average of 202. Overall the number of GPs and nurses in small towns has increased over the 30 year period covered in the report but small towns continue to experience a substantial gap in the number of psychologists and dentists per-capita compared to the national average. To close the gap between health services in urban and regional areas, the Australian Government allocated over $2bn to be spent over four years on programs to increase numbers of health delivery professionals.
The full Pillars of Communities report can be accessed via the website of the Regional Australia Institute.