The growing red tape burden on GPs is taking time away from patient care, according to the leading GP organisation.
Early findings from the Royal Australian College of GPs’ annual General Practice: Health of the Nation 2024 report found a significant increase in doctors’ concerns about their administrative workload – up from 60% in 2023 to 70% this year.
It was the top reason GPs gave for why they were planning on stopping practising in the next five years, with 66% indicating that a reduction in compliance would encourage them to stay working for longer.
“This should be a wakeup call for the Federal Government – even a small reduction in the admin burden on GPs will make a big difference for Australian patients because we’ll have more time for patient care,” RACGP President Dr Nicole Higgins said.
“GPs have the highest qualifications in primary care with over 10 years training. As a GP, I want to be spending my time listening to and helping my patients, rather than filling out forms to tick a box for various government agencies.
“But the reality is that GPs like me are forced to spend hours on compliance and reporting for overly complex Medicare rules and filling out long government forms that don’t integrate with practice software. It is a waste of the extensive medical training, skills and experience Australia’s GPs have.”
The report recommended scrapping PBS authority systems which forced GPs to make a phone call or use an online portal to prescribe certain medications, as well as reducing the length and duplication of information required for Centrelink, the National Disability Scheme, and Department of Veterans Affairs forms –by making them compatible with general practice clinical systems.
Similarly, the RACGP has called on the Government to overhaul My Health Record to make it fit-for-purpose, after the survey found that 31% of GPs either rarely or never used it, with less than 2% of documents viewed by general practitioners.
However, while administration may have increased with additional layers of complexity, the actual demand for GP services has taken a substantial hit nationally, with the rate of GP-type services used per person decreasing from 7.6 services per person in 2021-22, down to 6.6 per person in 2022-23.
To put that in perspective, US consumption shrank by 11% during the COVID pandemic – about five time more than during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, according to the World Economic Forum.
In 2022-23, 7% of Australians who needed to see a GP reported that they delayed or did not see a GP in the last 12 months due to cost, double the proportion of respondents in 2021-22 and the highest number ever recorded by the survey.
This is despite around 220 million services (8.3 per person) being subsidised under Section 85 of the PBS in 2022-23 – 89.6% under concession – and a further 7.1 million services subsidised under the RPBS.
Nationally in 2022-23, 80.2% of non-referred GP services and 30.2% of specialist services were bulk billed, yet only 51.7% of patients were fully bulk billed – a decrease from 65.8% in 2021-22 – resulting in average out of-pocket expenses of $108 for specialists, $65 for allied health services and $43 for non-referred GP visits.
When one considers that official estimates reveal that a full-time worker earning the minimum wage has just $57 left after essential weekly expenses, while a family-of-four on the same rate has only $73 remaining – healthcare clearly becomes a highly elastic, luxury good.
And as the share of low-paid employee households reporting one or more financial stress indicators rose from 20.3% to 26.9% in 2022-23, the 11% decrease in demand for GP services potentially marks a worrying trend of further market contractions in primary healthcare.