I thought Albo’s urgent care clinics were a waste – until I needed one

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

November 5, 2025 — 7.30pm

Most Australians have come to see free healthcare as our birthright, so I was shocked to hear a friend recently shelled out more than $300 for a specialist emergency clinic after accidentally stabbing her palm with a kitchen knife.

It wasn’t her first choice. She waited an hour in a crammed Sydney emergency department before the triage nurse warned it would be another four hours until she could be seen. In the end, she decided it would be quicker to drive half an hour and pay the premium to get it sorted.

That’s not an option for most Australians, but shows demand exists for a service our hospitals are no longer equipped to provide. Perhaps they never were.

Angus Thomson in the waiting room of an urgent care clinic.

Let’s compare her ordeal with what happened to me the following weekend, when I tumbled off the front of my surfboard and its fin ripped open a three-centimetre gash across my right foot.

I hardly needed an ambulance, but there was enough blood to pique the interest of the antagonist from Jaws. I left a trail of it in the sand as we retreated to the car, where I wrapped my foot in a beach towel and searched for the nearest medical centre – which happened to be a bulk-billed urgent care clinic.

The waiting room was quiet, occupied by the types of patients you might see in an emergency department on a weekend: a woman with a detached fingernail, an elderly patient who’d had a fall at home, families nursing sick children. Within 15 minutes, a triage nurse had inspected and bandaged the wound. I waited about an hour until the doctor called me in, threaded five stitches through my foot, and sent me on my way.

In NSW, the median time from arriving at an emergency department to being discharged is three hours. I was in and out of the urgent care clinic within two. That’s good for me, but it also means one fewer seat in an ED waiting room occupied by someone who probably doesn’t need to be there.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his re-elected government would spend $644 million building an additional 50 urgent care clinics across Australia, I was initially sceptical.

Albanese promised the clinics would offer free healthcare to millions and take pressure off emergency departments. But ED doctors I speak to say it is the small but increasing number of very sick patients – not the large number of less-urgent cases – that take up most of their time. An evaluation of existing clinics, quietly released on the eve of the election, found it was too early to say whether they were improving waiting times or the number of non-urgent patients turning up to nearby hospitals.

The clinics have faced teething problems, including staff shortages and access to out-of-hours medical scans, and doctor groups have argued they would lead to fragmented care, strain the existing workforce and were not cost-effective.

But urgent care clinics aren’t designed to replace regular visits to GPs. They’re meant to help people in situations like mine, when the only alternative on a Sunday morning was a hospital. By this measure, urgent care clinics are saving taxpayers; equivalent non-urgent presentations to EDs are estimated to cost about $616 per visit.

We may have to wait years for all 137 clinics to open, and for patients to learn they exist, before we know if that’s bang for buck. Labor’s flagship $8.5 billion bulk-billing changes, which began this month, could also convince families visiting urgent care clinics for free healthcare to go back to their GP.

Early evidence shows there is demand for something between a GP clinic and a hospital. I, for one, was happy to avoid five hours in an emergency department. And none of us should have to spend hundreds of dollars just to get a few stitches.

Angus Thomson is a health reporter.