{"id":254180,"date":"2025-10-31T22:50:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T22:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/254180\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T22:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T22:50:14","slug":"community-healthcare-centres-under-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/254180\/","title":{"rendered":"Community healthcare centres under threat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Caroline Hogg could barely believe what she was hearing. As she had done for 55 years, the former Labor Victorian health minister had called in mid-October to book a doctor\u2019s appointment at the Collingwood community health centre in Melbourne\u2019s inner north, only to be told there would be no more GP consultations.<\/p>\n

That same day, the centre\u2019s manager, cohealth, had announced that on December\u00a019, a week before Christmas, it would cease GP and counselling services at clinics in Collingwood, Fitzroy and Kensington \u2013 axing affordable, wraparound healthcare to 12,500 vulnerable Melburnians, local residents and workers.<\/p>\n

The decision came as a shock to staff and to patients who fear for a future in a wider health system already under strain and not geared for those with complex needs. Health professionals say the closures are an alarm bell for community health nationwide. On Thursday The Age reported that another wraparound healthcare provider, Better Health Network (BHN), planned to shut two of its sites in Melbourne\u2019s south-east, although those centres do not provide GP services.<\/p>\n

Cohealth is one of Australia\u2019s largest community health providers \u2013 the result of a merger in 2014 of services across Victoria. The non-profit now owns 21 clinics across that state and in Tasmania.<\/p>\n

Hogg, a Cain\u2013Kirner government minister from the 1980s on, was a young local councillor when the Collingwood centre opened in the 1970s as part of the community health push across Australia\u2019s poorest neighbourhoods. Its antecedent, Singleton\u2019s in Wellington Street, was established in 1869 by a devout evangelical couple who sought to provide free healthcare but also bring temperance to a pub-going, battler community.<\/p>\n

Today, the clinic provides a wide range of services under one leaking roof, including GPs, counselling, physiotherapy, podiatry, pathology, speech therapy and a needle and syringe program.<\/p>\n

Cohealth plans to close the crumbling Collingwood centre altogether mid next year and sell the site, which was bought with funds from the Whitlam government. The announcement comes under Labor governments at federal and state levels, and just days before the 50th anniversary of\u00a0Whitlam\u2019s dismissal.<\/p>\n

The news left Hogg in tears. \u201cThe care was always wonderful, thorough, thoughtful and non-judgemental,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a joy to visit the place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The closure is an affront to what she calls the \u201cCollingwood ethos\u201d. Surrounded by working-class landmarks such as John Wren\u2019s infamous illegal \u201ctote\u201d shopfront, the Collingwood Town Hall, the Magpies\u2019 former home ground, Victoria Park, and the Hoddle Street public housing high rise, the health centre is at the very heart of old Labor heartland.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis seems a particularly corporate way to go about things,\u201d says Hogg. \u201cThoughtless and cruel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Old inner Melbourne Labor diehards are fired up, accusing cohealth of betraying their trailblazing vision.<\/p>\n

Community health was always meant to cater for all locals. This reporter has attended the Collingwood centre for many years. It is especially important for those doing it tough: public tenants, refugees, the homeless, people with disability or with mental health or drug-related issues.<\/p>\n

Aisha Darawish is a public housing tenant who formerly lived at the Collingwood high-rise flats and is now based in Carlton. Born in Ethiopia, the mother of three says the news of the closure was one of the most painful things she\u2019s experienced. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt hurt like it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Aisha explains how in 2012 doctors, nurses, midwives and counsellors helped her through a traumatic pregnancy and a long postnatal depression \u2013 a kind of care she doubts she will find elsewhere. \u201cCohealth to me is like family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohealth says the closure of GP services is due to a worsening funding shortfall, decades of underinvestment, ageing infrastructure and a Medicare model that doesn\u2019t match the complex care the clinics provide.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Patients] will have two choices: they can either go without primary or preventative healthcare, then flood the emergency departments of public hospitals when their condition becomes critical, or they can die.\u201d<\/p>\n

The clinics at Collingwood, Kensington and Fitzroy employ 29 GPs; most will likely be made redundant. Cohealth board chair Kerry Thompson tells The Saturday Paper her organisation has worked for years to find a \u201csustainable future\u201d for its GPs. In September it wrote to both state and federal health ministers seeking urgent support, to no avail.<\/p>\n

She says cohealth has also repeatedly sought state assistance to upgrade the Collingwood centre, including a failed 2019 request for help with a redevelopment plan for\u00a0a ground-floor clinic with community housing above.<\/p>\n

At the federal level, Medicare rebates barely cover doctors\u2019 salaries, leaving a growing shortage of funds for nurses, receptionists and other operating costs. Cohealth lost more than $13 million through 2022\/23 and 2023\/24.<\/p>\n

Compared with private GPs, cohealth doctors tend to spend more time with patients, while Medicare rebates are structured around shorter appointments \u2013 paying more for practices that squeeze in more, shorter, consultations.<\/p>\n

Dr Cath Keaney works at Collingwood one day a week and in private practice other days. \u201cI can tell you firsthand it [Medicare] is not fit for purpose for community health,\u201d she told a packed protest meeting at Fitzroy Town Hall last Friday. \u201cThis is because clinical services at cohealth are exceptional.\u201d<\/p>\n

Valued cohealth services are \u201cinvisible\u201d to Medicare, she said, listing top-class nursing, immunisation, wound management and a\u00a0caring pharmacy that \u201cprovides safe and considered dispensing rather than being a\u00a0primarily retail outlet\u201d.<\/p>\n

Health professionals also fear the closures\u2019 knock-on effects, including inundation of already-stretched inner-city hospitals such as St Vincent\u2019s. Cohealth says it is trying to find alternative GP clinics for its patients, but many are already at capacity.<\/p>\n

Fitzroy psychiatrist Brian Stagoll was a president of the Collingwood and Fitzroy health centres years before cohealth took over management just over a decade ago. The Labor life member slams cohealth\u2019s decision as an \u201cact of bureaucratic bastardry\u201d.<\/p>\n

Closing the three services will cost the health system far more than it saves, he says. \u201c[Patients] will have two choices: they can either go without primary or preventative healthcare, then flood the emergency departments of public hospitals when their condition becomes critical, or they can die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stagoll is passionate about the legacy and the crucial role of community health in keeping communities \u201cafloat\u201d. He concedes cohealth\u2019s funding challenges, but asks \u201csince when is that an excuse to abandon the health needs of 12,500 vulnerable people?\u201d<\/p>\n

He despairs that big health providers have lost touch with the communities they are supposed to serve and says the three centres are not cohealth\u2019s to close or sell.<\/p>\n

Kerry Thompson says cohealth has a community advisory committee that helps with the organisation\u2019s planning. Its membership has not been made public.<\/p>\n

The Greens say blaming cohealth deflects heat from Labor and its failure to properly support healthcare to those most in need. MP for Richmond Gabrielle de Vietri told the Fitzroy public meeting cohealth had been \u201csounding the alarm\u201d for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must be pointing firmly at the state and federal Labor governments, because it is their responsibility to fund our community health sector,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Even for Labor governments long swept up by neoliberalism, the dismantling of such cherished health services looks a stretch.<\/p>\n

Community attachment to the centres is deep across inner Melbourne. With just a few days\u2019 notice, protest meetings in Fitzroy and Kensington were packed and overflowing last week. Federal MPs were present at both \u2013 they felt they had to be.<\/p>\n

In its landslide federal election win this year, Labor reclaimed the seat of Melbourne from the Greens. But the seat is now marginal and a state poll looms next year. Labor will also be hoping to win back Richmond \u2013 which takes in the Collingwood and Fitzroy clinics \u2013 which it held forever before the Greens took it in 2022.<\/p>\n

Labor\u2019s sensitivity to the closures was evident in the Victorian parliament this week. It allowed a Greens motion to pass calling for state commitment to a $4 million rescue package, $25 million at least to upgrade the Collingwood centre and a deal with Canberra for a long-term community health funding model. The opposition backed the motion.<\/p>\n

Labor powerbrokers are pushing hard for a rescue package. The Albanese government has described the closures as \u201cdeeply disappointing\u201d and urged cohealth to\u00a0reconsider.<\/p>\n

Though the federal government says community health will benefit from reforms to incentivise bulk-billing payments, due to kick in this month, cohealth says Medicare rebates won\u2019t cover the cost of the care it provides.<\/p>\n

In response to questions, the Allan government points to $188 million last year spent on community care across the state, and the $68.3 million allocated to cohealth in this year\u2019s state budget. A state spokesperson stresses the Commonwealth is responsible for Medicare and primary-care funding and notes that Victorian Minister for Health Mary-Anne Thomas has written to her federal counterpart seeking an \u201curgent solution\u201d.<\/p>\n

A Commonwealth spokesperson says discussions with cohealth and the Allan state government about \u201cpossible solutions\u201d are ongoing. A meeting is scheduled for next week.<\/p>\n

Former state MP and community health centre user Caroline Hogg says of the Collingwood clinic: \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible to overstate its importance. What it has saved governments, and in the way it\u2019s been embraced by the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s see, in the weeks before Christmas, how much the Collingwood ethos still matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n November 1, 2025 as “Royce Millar”.<\/p>\n

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