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These more recent concerns add to the years of well-documented healthcare issues facing the state - particularly the North - which have, in many cases, worsened since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago. The issues facing the state were outlined in detail in The Examiner more that 15 years ago, when then-reporter Alison Andrews published an in-depth report into the future of healthcare in the state.

"In 10 years, Tasmania, like the rest of the country, should have worked out a more efficient way of using its depleted doctor workforce while still attending to a steadily increasing number of patients. If we haven't, we will be in trouble," the 2006 report read. One year earlier, a Tasmanian GP Workforce census had also concluded Tasmania was the worst performing state in providing health services to its population.

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Almost two decades later, local government councils are being forced to step in to subsidise health-care costs to ensure their constituents have access. The rising rate of locum contracts has also no doubt added to the financial burden at every level of government in maintaining vital, accessible care in the state's regions, which if left unfixed will continue to add further pressure to the state's overworked metro healthcare centres. A string of governments have - by all apparent accounts - failed to redirect the orientation of the state's rural healthcare system - that orinantation being largely downward.

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Still very much fresh off his shadow health position in opposition, Minister Butler has been handed somewhat of a poisoned chalice. A would sympathise with the task ahead of him, sitting down with the president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia, Dr Megan Belot, who is no doubt one of many healthcare advocates urging him everyday to fix dire and urgent problems at a local, state and federal level.

In the past two weeks, the state premier has pointed twice to the federal government asking for more support to ease statewide bedblock and ambulance ramping at the LGH, after the latter issue contributed to the death of a woman earlier this month. Today, Ms Belot will be asking the minister to build on the $146 million already promised to help remedy rural doctor shortages.

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Healthcare was one of the key cornerstones of the Labor campaign in the lead up to the election and nowhere was it more pushed than in the tightly-fought electorate of Bass. Minister Butler, as well as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese travelled multiple times to the state ahead of the May election to promise change and solutions to aged care, regional health and doctor shortages. That message clearly resonated nationally, it's time to see if the promise will be met post-election.

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