‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’: Urgent care clinics failing to relieve pressure on hospitals, say doctors

Dozens of multimillion-dollar urgent care clinics set up around Victoria and touted by politicians as a silver bullet for the state’s healthcare crisis are doing “absolutely nothing” to ease pressure on overstretched hospitals, while threatening the viability of GP practices, doctors warn.

There are 38 urgent care clinics in the state, many of which were opened in 2023 by the federal government in a bid to take pressure off Victoria’s overrun hospital system by providing bulk-billed services for urgent, but not life-threatening, injuries and illnesses.

The federal government has argued the clinics are reducing the number of people turning up at emergency departments with non-life-threatening but urgent conditions by about 10 per cent, but this figure is strongly disputed by doctors on the front line.

Melbourne emergency physician Dr Sarah Whitelaw said the clinics were having a “minuscule” effect on Victoria’s overwhelmed emergency departments, which are being flooded by a wave of sicker, more complex patients requiring urgent care and hospital admission.

“The clinics do nothing to solve our problems,” said Whitelaw, who is the emergency medicine representative on the Australian Medical Association’s federal council.

“It is so frustrating every time we hear the phrase ‘reducing emergency department pressures’ because they haven’t decreased our waiting times in any way.”

The federal government’s own reporting on the system has found the introduction of urgent care clinics has not reduced emergency department waiting times.

In many metropolitan hospitals only 1 to 2 per cent of emergency department arrivals were being diverted to urgent care clinics, Whitelaw said.

This figure has come from emergency departments nationally, where staff have begun recording the number of patients opting to use urgent care clinics instead.

Official data shows emergency department arrivals have risen by about 4.4 per cent since the urgent care centres opened.

In 2024-25 there were 1,978,267 arrivals in Victoria, about 84,000 higher than in 2022-23, when there were 1,894,732 visits to the state’s emergency departments.

Emergency physician Dr Simon Judkins, who works in rural and metropolitan emergency departments, said hospitals in regional areas including Bendigo and Ballarat were “really, really struggling”.

“It’s not because of patients who need lacerations fixed up; they’re full of patients who’ve got complex care issues, who need hospital admission, and the hospitals are completely full,” said Judkins, also the Victorian president of the Australian Medical Association.

He said emergency departments were being left with wards full of patients who needed to be immediately admitted to hospital, but there were often no beds available.

The federal government oversees 29 of the clinics, while the state government manages the rest.

In this year’s state budget, the Victorian government allocated $20.9 million for the clinics, describing the funding as a way to “help reduce the demand on busy hospital emergency departments”.

The federal government announced a $1.8 billion national boost to the clinics in May this year and previously committed more than $88 million in direct grants for Victoria’s clinics.

Emergency doctors argue that funding would have been better spent on GPs, who manage chronic and complex illnesses to keep patients out of hospital, as well boosting staff numbers and increasing the number of hospital beds.

“Imagine what we could have done with those billions of dollars, investing it into GP clinics and providing them the capacity to do after-hours care,” Judkins said. “That would have been a much better choice.”

An evaluation of urgent care centres around Australia is underway, the federal government confirmed.

An interim report found the clinics were costing taxpayers up to five times more per patient than a standard GP consultation. Each presentation cost taxpayers more than $250 compared with a standard GP consultation, which cost roughly $47.

However, the federal government said the net saving from avoiding an emergency department presentation was estimated to be $381 per patient.

In April, Carmel Misale called an ambulance after a sudden, intense pressure in her head caused her to briefly pass out.

Instead of taking her to an emergency department, paramedics redirected her to an urgent care clinic in Northcote, warning of massive hospital waiting times.

But when she arrived at the clinic she was shocked to discover it was in effect closed. It was 2pm on a weekday afternoon, and Misale said the clinic’s only nurse told paramedics there were no doctors available.

“I was flabbergasted,” the mother of two from Reservoir in Melbourne’s north recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean you aren’t open?’”

Misale’s husband then drove her to the Epworth’s emergency department, where she underwent urgent testing, including a CT scan and an MRI of her brain. After 10 hours, she was diagnosed with vestibular migraines.

She’s concerned urgent care clinics are passing too many patients on to emergency departments.

Others who have used the medical clinics for urgent care are fierce advocates of the service, including people unable to afford the increasing cost of visiting a GP, or parents of children who find themselves caring for a sick or injured child out of hours.

However, Associate Professor Julian Rait, the Australian Medical Association’s federal vice president, warned that urgent care clinics were sucking doctors out of rural areas and hospitals, offering much higher pay and more sociable hours.

“It has a very distorting effect on the workforce basically; it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Rait said.

It is something Robin O’Neill, a GP in Camperdown in the state’s south-west, has experienced firsthand. He said enormous amounts of federal funding meant urgent care clinics were able to offer doctors between $250 and $400 an hour.

O’Neill said regular general practices were unable to offer this sort of pay under current Medicare rebates, which made it difficult for them to attract doctors, particularly in regional and rural areas.

“The government has now created a two-tier system where federally funded urgent care centres can afford to bulk bill and offer higher rates of pay to doctors,” he said.

“This in turn is causing pressure and workforce shortages in regular general practice clinics, which is most acute in rural and regional locations.”

Dr Aadhil Aziz, Victorian deputy co-chair of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, warned that underfunded GP practices were closing daily, noting his own Melbourne clinic recently shut down due to financial pressure.

He said increasing Medicare rebates was crucial.

“General practice is severely underfunded,” he said. “But if you fund it better we will be able to deliver a better-class healthcare system for everyone, which will reduce the number of people needed going to EDs.”

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said doctors had embraced the urgent care clinics and the government had been told they were having a positive impact on hospital emergency departments.

“When you need urgent but not life-threatening care, instead of waiting for hours at the local emergency department you can go to your local clinic,” Butler said.

Official figures showed there have been more than 722,800 visits to urgent care clinics in Victoria since they were opened in 2023, including more than 9000 visits for the week of July 21.

Victorian opposition health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier said the clinics were not operating as promised and had failed to ease pressure on emergency departments.

“Our health system is struggling to meet growing demand,” she said. “Labor should scrap the GP tax and provide greater support to our primary healthcare providers to keep people out of our busy emergency departments.”

A Victorian government spokeswoman said the urgent care units were needed to fill a hole in the nation’s healthcare system.

“The former federal Coalition government spent a decade gutting Australia’s primary care system, leaving too many Victorians unable to secure an appointment or afford to see a GP,” she said.

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