00:01The report is one of a series that has been commissioned by the Health Department to offer
00:07feedback on how these urgent care clinics are operating.
00:11These are facilities designed for people that have urgent but non-life-threatening injuries
00:16or illness.
00:17They can be quickly seen to and are specifically designed to be open after hours.
00:23What the report has found is that workforce shortages, shortages of doctors and nurses,
00:29particularly in regional and rural areas, has made it difficult for these clinics to be
00:34open the 14 hours a day from 8am to 10pm that Labor initially envisioned.
00:40There's also problems with accessing x-ray imaging and pathology services after hours.
00:47That's a problem, of course, if you want to take your child who you suspect has broken
00:51a bone to one of these clinics after hours.
00:54You could end up being sent to a hospital emergency department anyway because there's no access
00:58to x-rays.
00:59So, a lot of early issues here around workforce.
01:03Mark Butler, the Health Minister, has defended that the launch of these clinics.
01:08There's up to 137 will be online by the middle of this year.
01:13When asked about workforce shortages, he acknowledged that they were a problem across the health sector,
01:19but suggested that the government was working to get more doctors and nurses into training
01:23and enrolled, and that once they were available, that the urgent care clinics are quite an attractive
01:29place to work.
01:31We're making sure that we've got a strong pipeline of new doctors and nurses coming into
01:36the system.
01:37This is an attractive place to work.
01:39All the operators say that they find a lot of staff are keen to come and work in these
01:45clinics because it's really terrific work.
01:47The report looked at a few different ways of measuring these, particularly the impact
01:51on hospital EDs nearby these urgent care clinics, and found that about 10% of urgent
01:58care level presentations, that was a reduction in hospital waiting rooms.
02:04But there was no impact on the time waiting in EDs.
02:08So, if you're still presenting to a hospital ED with a broken bone or similar level injury
02:14or illness, you're not waiting any less time.
02:18So, no clear evidence of the diversion that we were hoping to see from hospitals into urgent
02:25care clinics.
02:26The health minister again asked about this, and he acknowledged that obviously there was
02:32more could be done.
02:33But he pointed to the fact that the research in the report is showing about 45% of people
02:39who do go to an urgent care clinic say they would have otherwise gone to a hospital ED.
02:44And he's chalking that up to a win, saying he actually wants to expand the urgent care
02:49clinic network.
02:51Well, we'd like to build out this network.
02:54As I said, we've steadily been ramping it up over the last couple of years.
03:00Now we'll get to 137 clinics over the next month or two.
03:05And by then we'll see 2 million patients every single year.
03:09Half of them at least would have gone to hospital emergency departments.
03:12So the important thing to acknowledge when talking about these urgent care clinics is
03:16they are of course hugely popular.
03:19You know, the minister there mentioning how many people are visiting them.
03:21The wait time from triage to treatment on average at an urgent care clinic is about 13
03:27and a half minutes.
03:28The issue here is really whether these clinics, it costs $1.4 billion to fund the 137 over
03:36seven years, whether they are doing enough to ease that pressure on emergency departments
03:41or if they are just supplanting GPs as the Coalition is suggesting.
03:45You know, it's just a little bit of something.
03:45It's interesting.
03:46It's interesting.
03:46It's interesting.
03:49It's interesting.
03:49You
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