Press conference with Minister Butler, Brisbane – 17 June 2026

RENEE COFFEY, MEMBER FOR GRIFFITH: It’s another week and another Griffith Medicare Urgent Care Clinic. We are very happy to be here at the South Brisbane Medicare Urgent Care Clinic. This clinic’s been open for a couple of years. It was one of the very first to be in Queensland, and so far we have had over 35,000 presentations here at this clinic, taking real pressure off our health system, off our public hospitals, including the PA which is located on site here, and this particular Medicare Urgent Care Clinic has been a wonderful addition to that primary care network that’s right here in our area. It has been such a fabulous addition.
 
It’s my pleasure this morning to introduce our Health Minister, Mark Butler, back to this UCC, and back to our community in Griffith.
 
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: Thanks Renee, and it's so good to be back at this clinic here in Woolloongabba. This is really one of the exemplars of the network. I'm really pleased to announce that today the last of our promised 137 Medicare Urgent Care Clinics opens up in Caloundra here in Queensland. We promised 50 Urgent Care Clinics at the 2022 election and we delivered 87 in that term and at last year's election we promised that by June this year we would deliver another 50, and we've delivered on that promise as well. And we now have this network of 137 Urgent Care Clinics country delivering high quality urgent care, seven days a week over extended hours, and importantly, fully bulk-filled.
 
This is a new model of care for Australia, a new chapter in the history of Medicare. It's quite common in many other countries that we usually compare ourselves to, but the idea of a care option somewhere between standard general practice and a fully equipped hospital is still a relatively new concept for Australia and it has worked terrifically well. Already in addition to the 35,000 odd people who have come through this clinic, about 3 million Australians have already seen an urgent care doctor and nurse at one of our clinics. And now the network's fully up and running, we think as many as two million Australians every year will go through one of these clinics. Most of whom would otherwise have had to go to the local hospital emergency department. This is a really important part of our broader agenda of strengthening Medicare, delivering more doctors to the system, importantly turning around bulk billing and delivering more bulk billed visits to the GP, cutting the price of medicines and delivering this terrific new model of care, the Medicare Urgent Care Clinic Program.
 
I'm delighted to be able to announce that we have delivered to the Australian people what we promised them at the last election, 137 operational Medicare Urgent Care Clinics. We're now going to hand over to Sophie who has been an attendee at this particular clinic.
 
SOPHIE, PATIENT: I've brought my kids to the Medicare Urgent Care facilities three times, and out of those three times, twice they were able to fully manage my kids condition here, and once they appropriately signposted us onto the local hospital and I'm really grateful to have an Urgent Care Clinic so close to us.
 
JOURNALIST: I guess what sort of urgent care do the clinics take care of? What's kind of the main reasons?
 
BUTLER: These clinics are established for urgent but non-life-threatening care. About one in three patients across the network have been kids under 15, and it doesn't take much imagination to think of why parents are bringing their kids here for the sort of respiratory illnesses that Sophie has talked about. You're overnight, you're very worried and you essentially have two options. One is to go to the local hospital ED or now take them to the Urgent Care Clinic. So many of them are those sorts of illnesses. But also they're the breaks and the sprains and the cuts that need urgent attention but don't need a fully equipped hospital emergency department. We know they get busy on Saturday afternoons with sports injuries. We know that in those times where general practices tend to shut down over holiday seasons, they get busy again. Kids getting their new skateboards for Christmas and falling off and breaking something.
 
It's the sort of thing that doesn't take much imagination to think of where people need urgent attention, can't get into their local GP, but don't have to go to the hospital emergency department.
 
JOURNALIST: Probably lastly, are most of these Urgent Care Clinics attached to hospitals or are they kind of standalone practices?
 
BUTLER: They're set up in general practice settings just like this one here in South Brisbane. And I was really keen to make sure as we rolled this model out that we went out to existing general practices in a particular region and asked them, do you want to take your practice to a new level, and in addition to your usual general practice work, become a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic? And so there's an open expression of interest process, a competitive tender process, then undertaken by primary health networks in the region, and those general practices that submit interests are chosen on merit. What we’ve found over the waves of expression of interest is more and more general practices expressing interest in being a part of this really exciting program.