The Australian Medical Association is calling for longer and better quality access to GPs and more funding to address hospital overcrowding, as well as a string of other reforms in a pre-budget submission revealed on Wednesday.
AMA president Danielle McMullen says pressures facing the healthcare system were cumulative and creating stress across the sector.
Dr McMullen says patients are being treated in corridors and are stuck in hospital beds due to having nowhere safe to go, with rosters being held together by the goodwill of burnt out staff.
"The hospital log jam is not a hospital problem, it's a system wide issue reflecting failures in aged care, disability support, community care," she told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
"It's costing patients time and dignity, and sadly, in some cases, their lives."
In January, National Cabinet agreed to a $25 billion additional public hospital funding deal to address growing pressures on the health and aged care systems.
But it is not enough to clear log jams that have plagued the public system for years as the Australian population continues to grow.
While urgent care clinics ease some of the pressure, Dr McMullen said it was not people with minor illnesses turning up to emergency departments creating the problems in the first place.
Instead, she said, it was severely unwell people who need to be in hospital, and a lack of funding in other areas.
"(Log jams exist) because we need more hospitals in other areas. It's because we can't discharge people back to aged care or disability care or safely to home," she said.
"We've got people sitting in hospitals who are medically safe for discharge they don't need to be in, spending sometimes years in a bed that then someone else can't get to."
Dr McMullen compared Australia's healthcare system to a house with cracks that desperately needed comprehensive funding rather than putting "plaster" over the problem.
"If our health system was a house, the cracks are now impossible to ignore and they must be remedied," she said.
Dr McMullen described general practice as the foundation of the system but said too much was being asked under a funding model that no longer reflected the reality of patient care.
"Patients are older and have more complex chronic conditions," she said.
"Their care takes more time and more co-ordination, but Medicare still largely rewards short, simple consultations."
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