UCC patients are happy and staff are busy, but changes are not being felt at the hospital level.
The second interim report on urgent care clinics finds that – while staff and patients are pleased with the clinics – there is no clear evidence that the wait times for urgent care-equivalent cases in emergency departments have improved.
Released on Friday, the report looks at nine measures of success using data collected between June 2023 and August 2025. It builds on the first interim report, which was released in March 2025.
For the measures covering timely treatment, safe and quality treatment, coordinated care, patient and carer experience and provider or partner hospital experience, UCCs received relatively high marks.
Wait times at UCCs are around 13 minutes – down from 14 minutes in the first report – and 88% of staff agreed that their service provided safe and quality care. Almost all patients rated the care they received as good or very good.
Nine in 10 patients were also receiving a clinical handover either directly to their GP, uploaded to My Health Record or given as a paper copy.
The second evaluation even reported that UCCs were gaining traction with other parts of the health system.
“While there remains opposition to the Medicare UCC model from GP peak bodies and local GPs on the grounds of perceived deskilling and fragmentation of care, there is growing awareness among GPs and hospital services of the role and value of the model, which is increasingly recognised as part of the urgent and primary care landscape,” it said.
“GPs highlighted the need for improved continuity of care and health system integration. Many GPs remain concerned about the potential for workforce and funding to be redirected away from general practice.”
Anecdotally, the report said, many of the GPs working in UCCs continued to practice in local clinics.
UCCs were less successful across the remaining four measures, which cover emergency department presentations, consumer behaviour, coordinated care within the health ecosystem and cost effectiveness.
In terms of reduced visits to hospital emergency departments, the report concluded that – even though 45% of patients who presented to a UCC indicated that they would have presented to hospital in the absence of a UCC – the availability of UCCs only reduced equivalent ED presentations by around 10%.
It does, however, note that specific issues with the way data is collected mean that this could be an underestimate.
“There is no clear evidence that waiting times and the proportion of patients seen on time has changed for urgent-care-equivalent ED presentations as a result of the availability of Medicare UCCs,” the report said.
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The proportion of presentations where it was reported that the patient would otherwise have attended ED remained steady between the first and second interim evaluations, while the proportion of patients redirected from a local ED to a UCC was at 1.3%.
Here, the report recommended that UCCs engage more proactively with general practice management and administration staff to support appropriate referrals to UCCs.
While the cost per UCC presentation technically decreased from $216 in the first interim report to $206 in the second report, this is still roughly five times the cost to government of a standard GP consult.
The estimated annual net savings in avoided emergency department presentations – using the same methodology as the calculations for the number of reduced equivalent ED presentations – amounts to around $36 million.
Editor’s note: shortly after this article was posted, the review was unpublished from the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing website. It is no longer accessible.
