While a billion dollars was ripped out of the health system when Tony Abbott was Minister, Julia Gillard and Labor are committed to fixing our health and hospitals – which will be funded nationally and run locally.

Key Achievements
 

• Increased hospital funding by 50%

• More doctors – as part of the largest single investment in the health workforce, we have doubled the number of GP training places to 1,200 a year by 2014.

• More Nurses: funding over 1,000 new training places for nurses every year

• More beds - a record investment to build 1,300 new sub-acute hospital beds

• Record numbers of Australians getting their elective surgery on time: more than 76,000 elective surgery procedures have been delivered in the last two years, and over 125 hospitals have received new elective surgery equipment and operating theatres

• Upgrades to more than 37 emergency departments in public hospitals and rolling out a new four hour cap on emergency department waiting times

• More than 850,000 dental check-ups provided under the Medicare Teen Dental Plan

• Increased aged care places by more than 10,000 including 838 new transitional care places to help up to 6,285 older Australians leave hospital sooner each year

• Introduced a health check-up for every 4 year old to make sure they are fit, healthy and ready to learn when school starts

• Cut Binge Drinking - closed the tax loophole that saw alcopop sales soar and implementing a $103 million binge drinking strategy. This has seen alcopops consumption fall by 30 per cent

• McGrath Foundation specialist breast cancer nurses employed and trained as part of our National Cancer Plan

• Rolling out preventative health programs in schools, workplaces and communities across the country