The latest health of the nation report has pointed out how preventive care and bulk-billing funding still remain a major issue to GPs.
As 2025 approaches its end, the RACGP has released its annual Health of the Nation report that showcases the trends GPs are noticing in practice.
The report includes responses from more than 2400 GPs nationwide, charting both local and national issues.
Reflecting on the changes from an election year, the report has predicted that preventive care will become a much larger healthcare priority in the very near future.
“The vast majority of GPs say they would like to do more preventative care, but they’re prevented because of lack of time,” RACGP president Dr Michael Wright told The Medical Republic.
“There’s two ways to do that, one is increased funding for longer consults, so that if you do spend more time with a patient, your patient’s not disadvantaged with higher out-of-pocket costs, but also as a GP, you’re not disadvantaged financially.
“The other way is through increased funding to support our practice team, like the GP led multi-disciplinary team.
“There’s a real opportunity to use a broader range of the health workforce, whether that’s a pharmacist an allied health provider might be like a diabetes educator or a psychologist or even a dietitian.”
It comes amid renewed calls for longer Medicare time-based items; the report found an 11% increase in average GP consultation times over the past three years.
“We know that our consultations are getting more complex, they’re taking more time,” Dr Wright told TMR.
“You can see for female GPs, the average consult is now longer than 20 minutes.
“So what Medicare calls a long consult is actually the standard consultation for the average consultation for our female GPs.
“We’ve been talking about the need to rebalance Medicare, to put more funding into longer consults and Health of the Nation just reinforces the urgency to do that.”
GPs were also the most commonly accessed health professional in the Australian healthcare system, seeing over 22.6 million patients with over 172 million health services provided.
Longer-than-acceptable GP wait times, as reported by patients, have also seen a decrease . Around of 99% of patients said they were able to access a GP when they needed to.
Cost still remains a barrier to patients with the report stating that “Medicare rebates have not kept up with the cost of providing care, placing greater financial burden on households”.
Bulk-billing has remained unchanged over the last 12 months, with the percentage of patients who were bulk-billed sitting at 56%.
According to the RACGP report, the government spending per patient has remained relatively unchanged for a decade, which has prompted the college to call for a reformed funding model that matches modern needs.
“We’re actually seeing that the funding to support GP services per person has basically been stagnant for a decade, while the spending on hospitals, or public hospitals, has gone up by 30% just in the last eight years,” Dr Wright told TMR.
“We know that if we better support general practice through more funding and more workforce support, we can take the pressure off hospitals like we’ve got to invest in general practice to do it.
“What that data shows is that investment to increase general practice funding hasn’t happened yet and is well overdue.”
Regarding the future for the GP workforce, the report showed a continued upward trend of GPs recommending general practice as a viable career for medical students.
This has increased from 44% in 2024 to 47% this year, but there is still concern, with decreases in medical students expressing interest in general practice and rural generalism.
“We definitely need to create more positive experiences, both in universities, so people know how amazing being a GP is and what the opportunities are in there,” Dr Wright said.
“Also through the hospital setting, so that people aren’t deterred from choosing general practice.
“We’ve got to fix that at multiple levels, even back to high school, to try to highlight to teenagers the value of doing general practice as a career.”
