A small country community is rejoicing after the federal government stepped in to save a local GP clinic from imminent closure.
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The Uralla Medical Centre on Hill Street was facing permanent shutdown by the end of January after a paperwork bungle involving accreditation to secure Medicare aid was denied.
But a decision to deny the GP practice of up to $120,000 in funding was reversed following an announcement by the federal health minister Mark Butler's office on Thursday.
"The decision to withhold payments has been overturned and payments will be made to Uralla Medical Centre," a spokesperson for the minister's office said.
Dr Ricardo Alkhouri said a representative from Medicare phoned him on Thursday morning to say he would soon start receiving the back-payments over a number of weeks.
"I'm not shutting down the clinic now," Dr Alkhouri told the Armidale Express.
"But in the long run, there are many things that need to be addressed."
The Uralla-based general practitioner said the Medicare decision put him in an overdraft of $29,000, only about $5,000 away from bankruptcy, on New Year's Eve.
"I was lucky to stay under $35,000 just for emergencies, otherwise I would be on the streets already," Dr Alkhouri said.
"I would have been destroyed."
Although having submitted all the required documents by October 20, Dr Alkhouri was assessed by Medicare as "non-accredited" during the week or so he was told to fill in one of their forms with the details of his electrician.
"That's how they stopped me from receiving the payment, for a piece of paper about the electrician," Dr Alkhouri said.
"Not because they found anything wrong. They came here and they checked the place, everything is spotless.
"We check every detail, expiry dates, everything. We're obsessed about it."
An issue with Medicare
Dr Alkhouri will be doing a Facebook livestream on January 22, which will include some of the frustrations he has experienced in dealing with how Medicare is distributed between GP clinics and hospitals.
He said the situation got so dire a couple of years ago that Walcha Hospital sent away a patient he had referred to them for an ECG (electrocardiogram) because Medicare ascertained it was a GP job.
"When he was there they told him, 'no, it's not our job, it's your GP's business to do the ECG. Go back to your GP'," Dr Alkhouri said.
"The next day, I rang the patient, and his wife told me that they kicked him out.
"So I rang the manager in the hospital and I told them, "you have one hour to bring the patient [to the hospital] and do an ECG, otherwise, I will (inaudible) immediately.
"And we had a big fight. So he called the patient and he did the ECG for the patient.
"The patient had ventricular tachycardia. He could have died in the next few hours."
Dr Alkhouri usually works 14-hour days five days each week with a staff of three admin and one part-time nurse serving about 3000 patients from Uralla, Glen Innes, Inverell, Walcha, Tamworth, Armidale and other areas. He also trains and teaches up to about 12 medical students every year.
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Public officials respond
Northern Tablelands MP Adam Marshall described the Medicare bungle as "one of the worst cases of bureaucratic overreach" that he had "ever seen".
"I trust Medicare has learned a lesson about the critical nature of rural general practice and how much we value it here in country areas," MP Marshall said.
"Everyone will be breathing a huge sigh of relief tonight."
Uralla Mayor Robert Bell also welcomed the good news, saying it was a great win for the community and common sense.
And Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce had many unanswered questions, including why something hadn't been done before it reached such a crisis highpoint.
"We will watch this space, and the plight of other vulnerable country towns very closely and continue to hold the Federal Labor Government to account for any further poor management of medical services to the bush," MP Joyce said.
The federal government's response came after MP Joyce, MP Marshall and others wrote separate letters to the Minister for Health's office, demanding the Medicare decision be reversed.
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