Medicare Urgent Care Clinics program evaluation
Independent evaluation of the Urgent Care Clinics program, reporting presentation volumes, patient and workforce findings, and cost per presentation.
out of 100 — see method
the level it is published at
availability changes without notice
Details
| Publisher | Department of Health, Disability and Ageing |
|---|---|
| Availability | published |
| Format | |
| Licence | not recorded |
| Coverage from | 2023 |
| Last updated at source | not recorded |
| Cost | free |
| Confidence | verified |
Questions this bears on
Notes
Recorded as a win for one specific reason: it publishes the number the program's critics use. The second interim report covers implementation to 30 September 2025, reports more than 1.8 million presentations, and states the cost per presentation -- $246.50 -- alongside an estimated $617 per avoided urgent-care-equivalent emergency department presentation.
A program evaluation that puts its own unit cost in print, against a comparator that invites the obvious objection about general practice being cheaper again, is doing something most program reporting avoids.
The limitation is granularity and format: it is a periodic PDF at program level,
so per-clinic utilisation and cost cannot be extracted, and small clinics would
raise genuine identifiable concerns if they were.
CORRECTION, 2026-09-03. This record previously carried last_checked = 2026-09-01.
That was wrong: the document was never opened. The entry was written from the
publisher's web pages and from reporting about them.
The project's own rule is to set last_checked only when someone has opened the
data, and to leave it empty otherwise. The date has been removed. Everything else
in the record stands as reported.
Sources
- Evaluation of the Medicare Urgent Care Clinics: Interim Evaluation Reports 1 and 2
