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Public denture scheme at crisis pointHealth Minister Daniel Andrews' glacial progress in reviewing rebates payable to public patients under the Victorian denture scheme is likely to result in the collapse of the scheme, the Member for Eastern Victoria, Philip Davis, said today. By Kevin Balshaw - 14th August 2008 - Back to News Health Minister Daniel Andrews' glacial progress in reviewing rebates payable to public patients under the Victorian denture scheme is likely to result in the collapse of the scheme, the Member for Eastern Victoria, Philip Davis, said today.
Mr Davis said dental technicians had run out of patience after waiting years for the State Government to decide if it would move to restore parity with the far higher level of rebates paid by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs.
As a result, Mr Davis said, some Victorian dental prosthetists no longer serviced public patients and the rest were on the verge of withdrawing their services.
He said the Health Minister's latest non-committal response could push them to the edge, and patients relying on the public dental health program in Victoria would be left with no affordable denture service.
Minister Andrews says in his reply to questions raised by Mr Davis that the Victorian Department of Human Services is continuing "to prepare a paper on issues relating to the difference between fees paid to private dental practitioners under the Dental Health Program and the dental fees schedule set by the Department of Veterans Affairs".
"We knew that early June when the dental practitioners approached me with a strong message that they had reached the end of their tether and I raised the disparity in fees on their behalf in the Parliament," Mr Davis said.
"Instead of providing a firm commitment to a timetable and an answer, the Minister is seeking refuge in bureaucratic process obviously in the hope of not having to make a decision.
"Another component of Victoria’s public health service is rapidly approaching a crisis due to inertia and a failure of public service management."
Mr Davis said the State Government undertook in 2002 to align rebates under the Victorian denture scheme with those of the Department of Veterans Affairs, but scrapped the agreement in 2004 and had subsequently resisted every attempt by the Australian Dental Prosthetists’ Association to have it restored.
Victorian prosthetists receive a rebate of only $950 for a full denture service costing between $1600 and $1800, while the Commonwealth's inflation adjusted rebate now stands at $1465.
Some 10,000 patients a year use the public denture service throughout Victoria.
In East Gippsland – one of the worst served areas in the state under the denture scheme – there are only four providers of prosthetic dental services and only one of those continues to offer an unrestricted service to public patients.
Source: http://gippsland.com/ Published by: kevin.balshaw@parliament.vic.gov.au
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