PM: Well it's great to be back in this great community around Ryde, and good to be here with Maxine McKew, and with our local representatives of the medical community from Ryde Hospital, and also from Royal North Shore. And thank you, Jason, for showing us around this morning. This is an important part of the hospital network of New South Wales, an important part therefore, of the hospital network of Australia.
What the Australian Government is committed to is building a new National Health and Hospitals Network, funded nationally, run locally. Because what we need is more hospital beds, more doctors, more nurses. And I've seen a lot of evidence of that today, here at this important hospital. Of course, a core part of that is to make sure that our medical workforce is properly planned, and that we have enough training places for that workforce as well. And that's why we want to see an additional number of training places across the country.
Therefore, what we'll be doing is providing up to $13.6 million to support additional clinical training places for university students in a range of services from metropolitan rehab services, to rural and remote health services. These will provide some 1744 additional clinical training placements, in Broken Hill and Newcastle and Shoalhaven, in Ryde, where we are here, and in Western Sydney.
This of course is on top of what we are doing in terms of the investment in additional GP training places and medical training places with some more than 6000 of those to be funded for the upcoming decade. And those are additional places. What does it mean for this community at Ryde? An additional 36 training places across the various disciplines, from medicine, to nursing, through to the allied health professionals. I met many of those allied health professional representatives here today.
This is an important step in terms of local health workforce needs. Unless we get the health workforce right for the future, with enough doctors, enough nurses, enough allied health professionals, we won't actually fix the fundamentals of the system for the long term. Of course, the other thing we need to do is to make sure we've got a National Health and Hospital Network, which is properly reformed. No more cost-shift, blame-shift, no more waste, duplication and overlap between the Australian Government and State Governments, but also investing in the future growth needs of the system as well. And that's why this is such an important building block for long-term delivery of health and hospital services for all Australians.
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