Advocating for Health Reforms in alcohol, healthcare funding, integrated care, obesity, and prevention.

The RACP is committed to advocating for significant reforms in key areas impacting public health, including addressing alcohol harm, improving healthcare funding, advancing integrated care, tackling obesity, and enhancing prevention efforts to reduce chronic disease and health inequalities.

Alcohol

Every day, physicians and paediatricians witness the harmful effects of alcohol on their patients, whether in addiction clinics, the emergency department, orthopaedic wards, rehabilitation centres, liver clinics, or assessing the impacts of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorders.

We're advocating for serious and wide-ranging reforms to address the health impacts of unsafe alcohol consumption.

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Healthcare Funding

The RACP actively engage in health and hospital sector thought leadership, policy deliberations, and decision-making. Our members drive policy contributions, offering their expertise as physicians and paediatricians for policymakers across a broad range of health issues.

In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this includes engaging with the Federal Government Budget process.

In Australia, we also contribute to hospital pricing and costs across the country, the nationally efficient price, and cost for hospital services.

We also engage with national health reform agreement negotiations.

Our work aims to eliminate drivers of health inequality and disease in both countries, improve integration of physician skills in healthcare systems, and promote sustainable healthcare.

Our members frequently contribute to health policy consultations, parliamentary inquiries, roundtables, and reviews.

Integrated Care

Integrated service delivery structures support accessible, more patient-centred health services offered closer to home for diverse populations. Integrated care helps health professionals work together to support patients.

Improving timely patient access to specialists in primary care, when help is first needed, is crucial.

The RACP work to improve patient connection points to specialists in ambulatory settings, before hospital admission, and in the community through better-integrated primary care. We work with governments in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to promote health funding model reforms and innovative service delivery models supporting specialists in caring for patients with chronic, complex, and multiple care needs in the community.

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Medicare

The RACP support re-orienting Medicare to better reflect community and contemporary patient and practice needs as an opportunity to redirect Australia’s health system to support high-value care.

Medicare reforms can streamline patient access to physicians and paediatricians.  

A Medicare reform priority for us is telehealth and virtual care expansion so that patients have the option to access a specialist in person, by video consultation or telephone consultation according to individual patient and practitioner need and circumstance. Telehealth via video and telephone are vital in enabling healthcare access for many rural, remote, or regional patients, older patients and patients with a disability.  

We support expansion for specialist consultations and also advocates for increased Government funding of videoconferencing technologies to overcome patient access and affordability barriers.  

We support broader Medicare reforms, such as reform to referral processes and MBS rebated team-based models of care, to make it easier for physicians and paediatricians to collaborate with other health professionals for integrated care.  

We are committed advisor to the Federal Government on MBS related matters, giving expert advice to the MBS review (2015-2020), Strengthening Medicare Review (2022-2023), the MBS Telehealth Principles Review (2023-2024) and Working Better for Medicare Review (2024).  

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Obesity

Unhealthy diets are major contributors to obesity, diabetes, dental caries, cardiovascular diseases, mental health conditions, and many cancers – the very diseases that fill our hospital beds and general practice clinics and strain the health budget. Physicians and paediatricians see patients and families every day who are struggling with obesity and related health conditions. They understand that these conditions are influenced by unhealthy diets and low physical activity driven by the obesogenic environment we live in.

RACP recognise the health burden created by obesity and the need for physicians and paediatricians to advocate for societal and systemic changes that will reduce the prevalence and impact of obesity.

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Prevention

Much chronic disease in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand is preventable, meaning the level of disease can be changed with government intervention, systemic environmental change, and individual lifestyle modification. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has found that roughly 38% of all diseases in Australia could have been avoided or reduced, being due to modifiable risk factors. In Aotearoa New Zealand, most illnesses and deaths are caused by non-communicable diseases that can be reduced or managed with exercise, by minimising alcohol and tobacco consumption, and modifying diet.

We’re committed to working with governments and industry bodies to address the social, economic, and political determinants of ill health in our societies and minimise harm.

Our advocacy on the proposed Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has highlighted the urgent need for a well-funded, independent, sustainable centre for communicable and non-communicable, as well as occupational diseases. We’ve outlined the strong positive contributions the proposed centre would make for public health units, prevention, and disease control responses in each jurisdiction.

Explore our media releases and submissions for further RACP prevention advocacy updates.