End of the road looms for Peel health van

But she said she was working to find funding to keep it on the road for another year by reallocating money given to the Shire of Waroona for disaster relief after the Waroona-Yarloop bushfires of 2016.

GP down south, which manages the Peel Mobile Health Service, were told in May funding for the van would stop at the end of June, prompting anger from community groups and non-profits who raised money for the service.

Ms Clarke said she was told by health minister Roger Cook there would be no money in the upcoming budget to keep the service running, but she said this was the fault of the previous Liberal government.

“Because it’s not in the budget you have to appreciate the money is tight, so from Roger Cook’s perspective, he’s looked at it and put it this way; you earn $500 a week, but you’ve got $600 in bills,” she said.

“Where are you going to get the extra $100 from? It doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it is when there’s no money coming in to pay that other $100.

“We appreciate it’s only $135,000, but to pull $135,000 out of the air, we’ve then got to cut it from somewhere else, so somebody else is affected.”

Ms Clarke said the service was reviewed by the health department in March 2016 and it was of concern that the results of the review were kept under wraps until after the 2017 state election.

“That they’ve sat there all this time and tried to blame this current state government and then left us with a bill we can’t pay because it’s literally not in the budget, it makes my blood boil,” she said.

“Knowing they were cutting this service off a month after the bushfires, that is disgraceful, that needs to be highlighted.”

Opposition spokesman Zak Kirkup said responsibility for cutting funds to the Peel Mobile Health Service lay at the feet of the state government after the Liberal party committed five years of funding to the service in 2012.

“Any claim by the government that it was unfunded or has been somehow cut short by a decision of the Liberal party is absolutely false,” he said.

“The Liberal party in government – Kim Hames as minister for health – funded this for five years.

“It now appears to me it would be incumbent on the health minister of the day to make a fresh decision about funding for this financial year onward.”

Mr Kirkup said any review of the service by the health department was not a decision by a government but merely a report by a bureaucrat.

“Everyone knows that bureaucrats do all these sorts of investigations, but the reason we elect a government, the reason we elect members of parliament, is to make decisions in the best interests of the community,” he said.

“The minister for health currently has the ability to make a decision on this, he is the one spending $8.6 billion on health in WA and somehow can’t find seem to find $150,000 a year for our community. I find that outrageous.”

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