Stephen Lawrence MLC has today announced that the NSW Government is improving access to healthcare for people living in rural and regional communities, providing financial assistance to over 81,000 patients from Local Health Districts covering inland NSW in the past year through the Isolated Patients Travel and Accommodation Assistance Scheme (IPTAAS).
IPTAAS provides financial assistance to patients who need to travel long distances for specialist healthcare that is not available locally. NSW patients have also received more money back in their pockets thanks to increased subsidies, with the average reimbursement per patient to be $482.
The NSW Government is embracing a comprehensive range of measures to improve access to care in our regional, rural and remote communities, including: delivering more health worker accommodation in the bush, doubling rural health worker incentives for the most critical and hard to fill positions to improve recruitment and retention, boosting doctors in our regional GP surgeries as well as hospitals through the single employer model, and deploying an extra 500 regional paramedics.