Palliative care services in Australia

Medicare Benefits Schedule data

The Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) is part of Australia’s public health insurance scheme. Through the MBS, the Australian Government subsidises the costs of a broad range of health services. The MBS subsidies pay all or part of the costs of these services, dependent on factors such as patient eligibility, the type of service and choices by health practitioners regarding the fees they charge for their services. MBS benefits are claimable only for services rendered by an appropriate health practitioner and which are listed on the MBS. 

Services Australia collects administrative data in processing claims for benefits under the MBS and provides this information to the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. The item numbers and benefits paid by Services Australia are determined based on the MBS, as listed in MBS Online.

The data presented in this report relate to services provided on a ‘fee-for-service’ basis for which MBS benefits were paid, and only for palliative medicine attendances and case conferencing services that are both provided by palliative medicine physicians or specialists, and are claimed under specialist palliative care MBS item numbers.

Patients who are referred to specialists or physicians in palliative medicine usually have:

• intermediate and fluctuating needs that might result in unplanned use of hospital and other services, and/or
• complex and persistent needs (physical, social, emotional, or spiritual) that are not effectively managed through established protocols (PCA 2018).

Information is also provided on the settings where the attendances were provided – in hospital or consulting room, or in other settings, such as attendance at a person’s place of residence, including home, residential aged care or institution (see Table SER 1). For case conferencing, it refers to community case conference and discharge case conference (see Table SER 2).

* Items 3003 and 3015 ceased on 31 December 2021, with telehealth services now claimed against relevant item numbers in Group A40.

Note: Refer to the Medicare Benefits Schedule Book July 2024 edition for full item descriptions (pages 308–309) and further information relating to MBS items for palliative care (pages 118–119).

Note: Refer to the Medicare Benefits Schedule Book July 2024 edition for full item descriptions (pages 309–311) and further information relating to MBS items for palliative care (pages 118–119).

Palliative care physicians and specialists may at times use other MBS item numbers when attending to palliative care patients. These items are not included in the data in this report, as they are not claimed specifically as a palliative care-related service under the MBS. Further, other medical practitioners (general practitioners and medical specialists) and health professionals also attend to terminally ill patients and provide palliative care, without the service being eligible to be claimed specifically as a palliative care-related service under the MBS. In other words, the reported number of patients who receive a palliative care-related service under the MBS is a known underestimate of total palliative care activity. Further, the data does not include referred attendances by palliative medicine physicians or specialists to public inpatients or public outpatients of hospitals and services funded from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs National Treatment Account.

It should be noted that a patient may access more than one type of these specific MBS items provided by palliative medicine physicians or specialists during the reporting period and that each service is counted separately in this report. 

The MBS data presented in this report (2024–25 and trend data) are based on the date the service was provided rather than the date of service processing, as this more accurately reflects the date a service occurred. This only includes services that were processed on or before 30 Nov 2025. Note that in reports released prior to 2022, the data was based on the date the service was processed by Services Australia and as a result, the data presented since 2022 releases are not comparable with previous releases.