A year or two ago, it used to cost just over $1,000 a day for a locum GP to cover while a permanent doctor was on leave. That has now tripled to close to $4,000.
The medical charity withdrawn its financial support to pay for fly-in doctors in five New South Wales towns because of this eye watering increase.
It's a dramatic change, we're moving from GP locum rates of $1,200 a day to anywhere between $2,500, $3,500 and $3,750 a day, Rural and Remote Medical Services RARMS CEO Mark Burdack said.
The charity's decision means that they will be saddled with the locum bills, but the practices in these towns will remain open.
We can't afford to pay locum costs moving forward.
If they lose a general practitioner, that means that each of the towns will be up to $2,500 and $3,500 a day to get a locum in. Burdack said that the organisation had managed to withstand the costs for the past few years because of the federal government's JobKeeper payments.
He said a request for this to be extended was knocked back.
He said that it is not something that has been taken up and that we're simply not in a position to subsidise locum coverage in communities when there isn't a permanent doctor without that JobKeeper money.
RARMS said permanent doctors in Braidwood and Tenterfield agreed to take over full management of the practices.
Mr Burdack said that the local council had stepped in at Bingara, north-west of Tamworth.
Gwydir Shire Council Mayor John Coulton said the council was not taking over the Bingara health service and the decision of RARMS came as no surprise.
In May, we spoke with Mark Burdack, but he couldn't give any guarantees that they could stay open under the present set-up.
This is not a function of local government, we are going to do everything we can to facilitate another arrangement.
We have been talking to other sources that we might be able to use at this stage, but we have nothing. We had a hook up with Gilgandra and Warren yesterday, two other councils in the same position, and we've been bouncing off each other. RARMS is negotiating future arrangements with the Western NSW Local Health District and Western Primary Health Network in Gilgandra and Warren.