Sometimes you face a health problem that cannot wait for a GP visit in the morning. On the other hand, emergency room wait times can be prolonged for patients whose condition isn’t life-threatening.
With this gap in mind, the Urgent Care Network was born.
What are the Urgent Care Network Clinics?
The Urgent Care Network was a major initiative of the FY24 federal budget. Its goal is to provide on-demand care for cases that need immediate attention but are not life-threatening emergencies.
If this sounds like a godsend for parents, it just might be. Figures show that one in three of the 250,000 patients attending these clinics since their roll-out in June 2023 were under the age of 15.
“Reaching the milestone of 250,000 visits to Medicare Urgent Care Clinics means hundreds of thousands of people got the urgent care they needed, without waiting for hours in a hospital emergency department,” said the Health Minister, Mark Butler.
The budget allocated spending of $350 million over five years with the goal of establishing over 50 such clinics around the country. The commitment was topped up in the FY25 budget, with the goal of reaching 87 clinics nation-wide.
As of late 2024, there were 75 urgent-care clinics up and running. Each is fully bulk-billed with funding from Medicare and there is no need for an appointment or a referral.
The GPs’ association has been critical of the Urgent Care Network initiative. “I understand that for governments, especially coming into elections, they like being able to have shiny new things and to cut ribbons,” said the association’s president, Nicole Higgins.
“But funding gets results and if they put this money back into general practice we will deliver.”
Earlier this year, a party leak suggested Labor will campaign hard on its urgent care network record and on Medicare more generally at this year’s federal election. Already in December, Mark Butler was calling attention to Peter Dutton’s role as Health Minister in the Abbott government in 2014, when the Medicare rebate freeze was implemented.
The Urgent Care Network clinics are mostly in outer-suburban sites in the major metropolitan areas, which are expected to be where the election is decided in 2025.
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