Radio interview with Minister Butler, ABC Radio National – 3 March 2025

SALLY SARA, HOST: Minister, welcome back to Radio National Breakfast.
 
MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Thanks very much.
 
SARA: So this is a plan for 50 new Urgent Care Clinics. Where are they going to be placed and how did you decide on these locations?
 
BUTLER: We've published a list of them. I can't tell you every one of them. But the question of how we selected them reflects the first tranche that I announced in the election campaign too, back in 2022. That is the most important indicator is what's happening in our local hospitals. We looked at the hospitals which have very high presentations of semi-urgent and non-urgent cases; cases that could be dealt with in an Urgent Care Clinic. We looked at bulk billing rates and we also looked at the geographical spread. If you get the what will be 137 clinics up on a map, you'll see they're quite evenly spread, particularly in our major cities, because I wanted to ensure that as many Australians as possible live within a reasonable driving distance of the clinic. Once these 50 are up, 4 in 5 Australians will live within a 20 minute drive of a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic. That means that about 2 million Australians every year will get totally free care, high-quality urgent care at a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic instead of having to go to a hospital.
 
SARA: The independent MP Doctor Monique Ryan says healthcare is too important to be used for pork barrelling. She's questioning the locations of these clinics. Are you confident that they are in the places of greatest need rather than greatest political need?
 
BUTLER: Absolutely. I'm not sure why Monique Ryan would be saying that. I mean, these are subject to an evaluation that I promised at the last election that is ongoing and will deliver a report to government in 2026. I'm very confident about these locations. The ones that are operating already are delivering an incredible service. They've seen 1.2 million patients. A very big number of them are kids under 15 who, fall off their skateboard or get injured at sport and would otherwise have spent hours waiting with their mum and dad in a hospital ED.  I'm very confident. This is a new model of care for Australia. It's very common in other countries. It's still a relatively new model. Some doctors’ groups are a bit resistant to it, but a very big survey of doctors that was published late last year showed that 70 per cent of GPs support the model, 80 per cent of GPs think that it's helping with pressure on our hospital emergency departments, and the feedback we get from people who use it is just terrific.
 
SARA: Minister, we heard from Dr Danielle McMullen this morning from the AMA, raising a number of concerns about this model and this proposal. One of the issues that she raised was increasing incentives for GP clinics to be able to open after hours. And she's saying that those provisions currently don't kick in until 8 pm, whereas many staff have been on since 7 or 8 am and it's not capturing them. Would the government be open to making some changes so that after-hours provisions kick in earlier for GPs?
 
BUTLER: We received a review of the after-hours system for general practice, not specifically for specialised Urgent Care Clinics. Now we're talking about the 8,000 general practices we have across the country. We're working through that review, obviously in consultation with groups like the AMA and presumably we will act on those recommendations in the future. But this is quite a different question. These are specialised clinics. The doctors and nurses working with them often have some sort of background in emergency medicine. They're open 7 days a week, they're fully bulk billed. They have access to pathology and X-ray imaging, which is particularly important because a lot of the cases that come through are breaks or fractures. This is quite a different model and dealing with a different pressure than the one I think Dr McMullen was talking to you about.
 
SARA: Minister, on the bulk billing announcement made a week ago, it was claiming that 9 out of 10 visits to the GP will be bulk billed. But that's not 9 out of 10 people. Can more be done to ensure that more Australians are bulk billed?
 
BUTLER: There will still be some gap fees in the system as the 9 out of 10 figure implies. People on high incomes may well still be charged a gap fee in parts of the country. But what we were particularly focused on in making the bulk billing support available to all Australians for the first time ever, is middle Australia, who don't qualify for a concession card and have been facing higher and higher gap fees to go and see the GP. They're telling us more and more that they're simply choosing not to go to the doctor because they can't afford it, which is obviously terrible for their health and for the health of the nation. We are focused on really lifting that bulk billing number. It's currently quite low for those patients who don't have a concession card and it's dropping fast, which is why we took the view we had to take some pretty drastic action.
 
SARA: Minister, the federal government has privatised $1.5 billion in aged care assessments when the Aged Care Royal Commission recommended against it. Some of the outfits which have won these contracts are connected to aged care providers. Has the government learned the lessons from situations such as the PwC scandal about companies having dual roles?
 
BUTLER: That's not right. When I came into the job as Health and Aged Care Minister, the aged care assessment, which is the program that assesses older people for aged care, whether it's in their home or in aged care facilities, that was in the process of being handed over to the private sector, according to a decision made by my predecessor, Greg Hunt. I stopped that, all of the assessments for nursing homes or aged care facilities will continue to be done by ACAT teams – aged care assessment teams who are nurses employed by the state government – which is what's been the case for decades. Either 50 or 60 per cent, I can't remember off the top of my head, of the assessments for in-home care, so people receiving care in their own home, will also be done by those same state government teams. We haven't privatised that. In fact I reversed a decision that the former government had taken. There is some private assessment happening in the home care area, but I've been particularly concerned about assessments for nursing homes being handed over to the private sector and I reversed that decision. That was 2 years ago.
 
SARA: On a separate issue, we've had a text message come through Minister, saying when Mark Butler halved the number of better access sessions for psychology he said he would do something for complex clients. He never did. What have you done to follow through on that commitment from one of our listeners?
 
BUTLER: What we've done is, we're in the process of opening up more than 60 Medicare Mental Health Centres. They're particularly targeted for people with more complex presentations. They're available on a walk-in basis. They're completely bulk billed, unlike the very significant gaps that people pay psychologists under the Better Access Scheme. As well I've provided tens of millions of dollars in funding for general practices who do a lot of the work seeing these clients, to bolster their support with social workers, mental health nurses and other important allied health professions as well. But I don't accept that I halved the number of sessions. It was a decision taken by the former government to increase the sessions during the COVID emergency and then to reduce them back to the level they had been for many, many years, which is a cap of 10 sessions.
 
SARA: Mark Butler we'll need to leave it there. Thank you for your time this morning.
 
BUTLER: My pleasure. Thanks very much.