Labor Senator for South Australia Karen Grogan recently held an Aged Care and Regional Health forum in Mount Gambier.

The public forum was held with Labor candidate for Barker Mark Braes at the Southgate Motel and was attended by GPs, aged care workers, nurses and other allied health professionals.

“What we’re hearing is that people are having extreme problems that are just exacerbating, they’re just getting worse in terms of accessing GPs particularly,” Ms Grogan said.

“But also the challenges in regional areas of other health services, so things like mental health and access particularly to psychologists.

“There are some basic services that are not being offered in certain regional areas and that’s highly problematic.”

Ms Grogan said an elected Albanese Labor government would fund a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic in Mount Gambier, which would ease pressure on hospitals.

She said the major issue people wanted to discuss was aged care and key issues included staff shortages, poor quality of food and lack of nutrition and insufficient care hours.

Ms Grogan said an elected Labor government had committed to 24/7 nursing care in aged care facilities, additional care hours and covering increased wages for aged care workers.

She said Labor had also committed to 465,000 free TAFE places which would open more places for people to train, including in aged care, along with 20,000 new university places.

“There’s no one silver bullet, there is no one answer, there’s a complete systemic fail in aged care,” she said.

“We need better representation of the issues that regional people are facing in our Federal parliament, so their issues are raised and are dealt with, because the statistics hide a lot of the reality of the lived experience of people in regional areas.”