Accreditation standards, advanced skills endorsements and urgent care items could go a long way toward assuaging GP concerns about urgent care clinics.
A new study has identified seven key concerns among clinicians working in Australia’s burgeoning urgent care clinic sector, which researchers believe could be addressed by implementing four practical solutions.
The paper, published on Monday in the Australian Journal of General Practice, surveyed clinicians working at various UCC models across the country between mid-2023 and mid-2024.
By and large, the most pressing concern among doctors who completed the survey was capacity.
“At the moment, predominantly it’s a one-doctor, one-nurse … model, and the concern with that was always going to be, ‘what happens if a bus turns up and the capacity is not there to see all those patients’,” GP and lead author Dr John Adie told The Medical Republic.
“I think a lot of my colleagues shared that concern, and that’s good to hear, because then we can lobby government, and we can also write protocols for what happens if the bus does turn up.”
The other six common concerns included the absence of a national accreditation standard, the variation between clinician expertise and qualifications, the uncertainty of future funding, gaps in knowledge among GPs, public knowledge about what classified as “urgent” and a feeling that UCCs were taking away work that GPs could do if funded properly.
“Some medical doctors commented that general practice could do the work of UCCs if they had appropriate remuneration,” the article read.
“Responses included ‘UCCs are taking work GPs could do if appropriately funded’. Some GPs expressed: ‘I am doing work that could be done in any GP practice if the GP received the same level of funding’.
“They also indicated that patients are ‘better managed in a standard GP setting’, but patients are ‘not wanting to pay out-of-pocket costs’, ‘UCCs take funding away from primary care’ and ‘if primary care was properly funded, UCC wouldn’t be needed’.”
Dr Adie, who chairs the RACGP urgent care specific interest group, said he would like to see new GP item numbers that could cover urgent care work.
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These, he said, would allow a larger number of doctors to be able to work in UCCs and would financially encourage GPs to provide urgent care services.
“Someone [recently] made the comment that, when people come to a GP-led urgent care centre, they usually see a GP,” Dr Adie said.
“I think the lights went on for a lot of people [at that].
“The other point is … that urgent care centre isn’t a gravy train.
“There’s not a whole lot of money to be made from it, but there’s less of a loss [compared to] when you send people to the emergency department.”
Other suggested fixes included a framework to recognise advanced skills training in urgent care and allowing physician and emergency medicine specialists to work in Medicare-funded UCCs.
The study also recommended an accreditation standard to ensure uniform qualifications and experience in staff across clinics and a public health campaign to help define which emergencies are appropriate for urgent care clinics.
Australian Journal of General Practice 2025, online 1 September
