ROBERTSON has been ousted from an opportunity to attract doctors through a federally funded rural incentive program.
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The Southern Highlands village of fewer than 2000 people has been reclassified as part of greater Wollongong.
Its inclusion in the large coastal population means it is not eligible to attract or retain doctors with rural pay incentives.
The assistant Minister for Health, Senator Fiona Nash, announced there would be a new rural GP classification system last October.
The Modified Monash Model, which came into effect on July 1, classifies towns on criteria such as remoteness and population size.
Most towns in the Southern Highlands have been classified as 'MMM 3', with the exception of Bundanoon, Wingello and Penrose (5).
Robertson has been classfied as 'MMM 2', a category that has been excluded from payments under the rural incentive program.
Under the former system of classification, all towns of the Southern Highlands had been ranked and funded equally.
A MMM2 rating is for towns within 20km by road of a population in excess of 50,000 people, the federal Health department says.
"The centre of Robertson, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is within 20km road distance of the boundary of the Wollongong community," said a federal Department of Health spokeswoman in a written response to a Southern Highland News query.
Online map software estimates Robertson is 22.5km by road to Tullimbar, the next town towards Wollongong, via Macquarie Pass.
The spokeswoman continued: "To recognise that larger towns have a functional service area wider than their town boundaries, “buffer zones” have been used to more accurately define a town’s expected functional service area.
"The buffer zones are based on road distance calculations provided by the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre.
"The sizes of the buffer zones were considered by ... key stakeholders and technical experts."
Federal MP for Throsby, which includes Robertson, Stephen Jones, said he had already written to Senator Nash on the matter.
"I was aware a reclassification was going on," Mr Jones said. "The old system basically worked on distance from a capital city. "Doctors themselves were agitating for a change: the Rural Doctors Association advocated the system that has been put in place."
When Senator Nash announced the new system, "everyone including myself assumed there would be grandfathering or a transition put in place: that is, not taking money off the doctors currently getting it. They haven't done that, to my knowledge," Mr Jones said.
"I have written already to the Minister asking that she put in place transition arrangements to deal with ... this."
Mr Jones said the new system was still an improvement on the old, which had "perverse outcomes" such as allowing rural incentive payments for "resort towns" such as Cairns, which did not struggle to attract and retain doctors like smaller, more remote towns.
Mr Jones said that, so long as the "right sort" of transition from old to new classifications occurred, he supported the new one.
"Wherever you draw a line, someone is going to fall in or out," he said. "I think there will be some areas, particularly where a practice is marginal, where doctors will decide it's no longer viable, or they reduce services or hours, because of these cuts.
However, Mr Jones conceded the new classification didn't "really make a lot of sense.
Patients in Robertson "head west, not east. They're a part of Wingecarribee, not Shellharbour."