Medicare-subsidised GP, allied health and specialist health care across local areas

The COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on various aspects of everyday life, including health care. The pandemic demonstrated how a health crisis can drastically influence the delivery of primary care services within the community, as seen by changes in consultation styles with patients and the uptake of digital health advancements. Some of the changes included:

• Telehealth in primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic was an essential measure that enabled continuity of care. Between March 2020 and March 2022, around 17 million Australians used over 100 million telehealth consultations (Department of Health 2022a).
• Many of the Medicare Benefits Schedule telehealth items introduced on a temporary basis in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have been made permanent, including telehealth services provided by GPs, medical practitioners, nurse practitioners, participating midwives, and allied health providers (Department of Health 2022b).
• The introduction of electronic prescribing allowed continuity of care as well as reduced administrative burden for health care providers through more effective management of prescription refill requests (ADHA 2024). As at April 2024, over 219 million electronic prescriptions have been issued since May 2020 by around 86,000 GP and nurse practitioner prescribers (ADHA 2024). Electronic prescribing is now widely available and forms part of the broader digital health and medicines safety framework in Australia. For more information, see Digital health.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic also highlighted the need to further investigate ways to support all Australians’ access to primary care services. The use of telehealth services and digital health information was found to be least accessible to those from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, those with low literacy levels, low socioeconomic status and people living in rural and remote areas (NHMRC 2022).