News
8 April, 2025
UK docs just the shot
MORAYFIELD Health Hub is bringing in 20 general practitioners (GPs) from the United Kingdom (UK) because of the lack of available local GPs and increasing demand in the area.
Owner of the general practice and Urgent Care Clinic (UCC) at the hub, Evan Jones, said the clinic had around 45 GPs for its 230,000 registered patients at the general practice, noting the “very high demand for medical services.”
“Because we’re in an outer metropolitan area with rapid growth, our problems are all about how we keep up with growth in demand, so we’ve been lucky enough to have a number of these high-quality, UK trained GPs, that we’ve been able to convince to visit sunny South East Queensland,” he said.
“It’s good for them, good for us and good for the community.”
According to Mr Jones, the GP shortage in Australia is due to several reasons, including lack of funding to encourage entry into the field.
“There has been a chronic underfunding of general practice for many years,” he said.
“General practice was being seen as a less attractive field for doctors and so we’ve had trouble attracting people, but that has started to change around.
“We’re training more Australian GPs and, under some new initiatives, will be training more Australians to be GPs.”
Mr Jones said these initiatives will take time to be felt amongst the medical community, due to it taking new students 10 years to become a fully functioning practitioner, creating a lag in addressing the issue.
According to Mr Jones, bringing in certified GPs from overseas helps fill the gap, as they can practice straight away despite needing six-month supervision.
“UK GPs need some supervision and additional training because of the unique characteristics of Australian medicine as opposed to elsewhere, but they are very experienced in the management of general practice problems,” he said.
“We need a lot more GPs and are lucky we have a large amount of specialists that we have been able to encourage to come to the community, which is great for patients so they don’t have to go into the centre of Brisbane to access specialist care.”
The UK GPs can only work in the general practice clinic while completing a six-month supervised accreditation program, being able to assist in the UCC afterwards.
The current GPs of the clinic already work between the general practice and Urgent Care Clinic.
This comes just a few weeks after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the Urgent Care Clinic, promising to open 50 additional UCC nationwide, including one in Burpengary, if re-elected.
Mr Jones said the Morayfield UCC has already delivered services to over 18,000 patients in the first three months of this year, seeing between 90 and 120 patients per day.
“About 60 per cent of those patients tell us that if they hadn’t been seen at the UCC they would’ve presented to the Emergency Department at the public hospital, so that’s a substantial pressure taken off the hospitals,” he said.
“It was largely in response to community demand at the last election that there was refunding for the UCC.”
A spokesperson for Health Minister Mark Butler said strengthening Medicare is key to keep GPs from “leaving the system in droves.”
“Thanks to the Albanese Labor Government’s investments more doctors have joined the system in the last two years than any time in the past decade,” he said.
“More doctors are registering to practice in Australia, more junior doctors are training to become GPs, and more medical graduates are aspiring to become GPs since our Government’s record investments to strengthen Medicare.
“A re-elected Albanese Labor Government will strengthen Medicare with a $617 million investment to train more homegrown doctors and nurses.”
