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An interim report into Medicare urgent care clinics (UCCs) shows that they are five times more expensive than a GP consult according to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP).
The Department of Health and Aged Care recently released an interim report evaluating the UCC program.
But the RACGP has said it doesn’t see the value of these clinics, stating that it’s cheaper to see a GP.
“The report confirms what we already knew, urgent care clinics are an expensive model of care, which could be better and more efficiently delivered through existing general practices,” RACGP President Dr Michael Wright said.
“The Government’s election commitment to roll out more urgent care clinics will mean more than $1 billion will be spent on setting up these clinics, and the report states that each presentation costs $246.50,” he said.
“This sum is cheaper than a visit to a hospital emergency department; however, it’s significantly more expensive than a standard GP consult, which costs taxpayers a little over $42,” Dr Wright said.
“So, your average urgent care clinic visit, seeing a GP who you may not even know, is more than five times as expensive as a consult with your regular GP,” Dr Wright said.
The federal government has announced an extra 50 bulk-billing clinics by 2026 if it wins the upcoming election.
The investment, worth $644 million, will be for new clinics in every state and territory.
Despite the criticism about the UCCs, Health Minister Mark Butler stands by them, saying that they take pressure off already-crowded emergency departments.
“They were opposed by doctors’ groups, by the College of GPs and by the AMA. But I’m convinced they are the right thing to do. They’ve already seen about 1.3 million patients across the country since we started opening them about 18 months ago, every single one of them is bulk-billed,” Minister Butler said.
“And the vast bulk of them tell us that if the clinic wasn’t available, they would otherwise have gone to the hospital ED [emergency department] [where] they’ll spend hours and hours waiting in a crowded hospital emergency department,” Mr Butler told ABC Northern Tasmania.
The UCC program kicked off as a pilot in June 2023 in response to recommendations arising from the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce. The aim was to take pressure off emergency departments in the nation’s hospitals by offering alternative GP-led care for non-life-threatening conditions.
The interim report showed that the mean wait times at the UCCs were much lower than emergency departments, at 14.5 minutes, and almost double in emergency departments with a mean of 31 minutes for triage category four and 24 minutes for category five.
While waiting times for patients are shorter at UCCs, the RACGP argues for accessing urgent care through general practice.
“All specialist GPs are trained to perform urgent care, and all practices and GPs routinely provide urgent care to their patients. Accessing urgent care through general practice improves patient health outcomes because continuity of care is embedded,” Dr Wright said.
“The best, most cost-effective way to increase access to urgent care and ease pressure on hospitals is to support existing practices [to] expand their current services, including offering more after-hours services,” he said.
“If the funding dedicated to urgent care clinics instead went to practices, we could be doing much more to help patients with urgent care needs. There’s no substitute for the high quality care provided by a GP who knows you, and your history, including in urgent care situations.”
The RACGP also said that GPs had raised concerns about a lack of communication between the urgent care clinics and a patient’s usual GP.
“The report reveals that only 68% of patient presentations to urgent care clinics had an electronic discharge summary [sent] to their usual GP. This constitutes inadequate clinical handover; because without this information, a GP may not even know that their patient went to an urgent care clinic, let alone what health issue they were being treated for,” he said.
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