6th of February 2025, 11:01am
Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):
I rise to make a brief contribution to the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Paramedic Practitioners) Bill 2024, and let me open by just saying that Legalise Cannabis Victoria is delighted to support this bill. I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for our paramedics. I have been involved in a few medical emergencies in recent years – a product of the passage of time – and I recall the profound sense of relief that I experienced when I saw those paramedics walking up the path to the front door, knowing in my heart that I was in the hands of professional, competent and compassionate health professionals who would take on board the challenges that were confronting us. I do not think we really understand or appreciate just how important paramedics are until we need them. I am not hoping that people do need them, but it is fabulous to know that they are there.
I think we also mostly think of paramedics showing up in ambulances and responding to emergency calls and basically then doing immediate treatments and transferring people to hospitals. The paramedic practitioner is a new and wonderfully extended role. Paramedic practitioners will be qualified to provide greater levels of care in settings outside of emergency patient transportation, including but not limited to GP surgeries, community health centres, public and private hospitals, aged care facilities and alcohol and other drugs facilities. They will operate in much the same way as nurse practitioners have for some years now in the community, and clearly that exercise with the nurse practitioners has been a terrific success. Paramedic practitioners will provide primary care services like health promotion, disease prevention, acute care and assistance with management of chronic health conditions. They can follow up with patients, enabling that continuity of care, and can also refer patients when necessary.
Critically, paramedic practitioners will be able to handle and administer scheduled medicines, allowing them to prescribe and supply medications on the spot. And this is the substance of the bill before us, if you will pardon the pun. The bill before us amends the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act 1981 to define a paramedic practitioner, and that is a registered paramedic who has completed the relevant postgraduate qualifications and meets the prescribed experience requirements, and to authorise them to practise autonomously. It gives paramedic practitioners the authority to obtain, possess, use, supply, sell, administer and/or prescribe schedule 2,3,4 or 8 medicines. It allows them to access and disclose information on the SafeScript database and inserts a requirement for practitioners to check the database before supplying or prescribing a monitored poison.
There are currently, as I understand it, 29 paramedics undertaking the paramedic practitioners masters degree, and once they graduate they will be deployed primarily to regional areas. The government, I am pleased to see, has also committed to funding scholarships for a further 100 paramedics over the next four years, and I have no doubt that these numbers will grow. Paramedics have limited career opportunities currently. We lose all too many paramedics through burnout because it is a tough gig, and unfortunately they end up leaving the sector.
The CEO of the Australasian College of Paramedicine John Bruning has warmly welcomed the professional recognition and expanded career opportunities for paramedics, stating that the
… creation of a Paramedic Practitioner role in Victoria is a transformative step for the profession and for the healthcare system as a whole …
This is something that has been advocated for and by the ambulance union for some time. The member for Melton in the other place, Mr Steve McGhie, who is also a former secretary of the ambulance union, mentioned that he had approached the then health minister about the idea back in 2016. It has the support of the ambulance union and the paramedics association, so it is great that it is finally being rolled out.
Victoria is the first state in Australia to introduce paramedic practitioners, but they have been operating in the UK since the early 2000s and have, over time, accounted for an approximate 50 per cent reduction in patients unnecessarily being transported to hospital. In that context I do not think anyone in this place could be other than supportive of this initiative. We commend the government for taking this step to reduce the number of people that unnecessarily end up in our emergency departments. We believe it will go some way to relieving the pressure on our overstrained health system and hopefully may also help to retain more of our dedicated and hardworking paramedics.
[Bill passed without division]
