Cleanbill 2024 bulk billing GP clinic report shows Wide Bay shortfall

The struggle to find a Wide Bay Burnett GP clinic offering bulk billing is getting worse, with a new report revealing how scarce the service now is for hundreds of thousands of regional residents. Vote in our poll.

The struggle to find a Wide Bay Burnett GP clinic offering bulk billing is getting worse, with a new report revealing how scarce the service now is for hundreds of thousands of regional residents.

Wide Bay residents seeking a doctor who will bulk bill are finding themselves with little choice, with new figures showing less than one in 10 clinics across the electorate are offering the service.

The figures complied by health care directory Cleanbill says the electorate, which stretches from Maryborough to Noosa, has a bulk-billing availability rate of 7.7 per cent in 2023-24, meaning more than 90 per cent of clinics do not offer it.

This was down still further on the year before, when not even one in every five clinics (17.9 per cent) had bulk-billing on offer.

The rates were only slightly better across the rest of the Wide Bay Burnett.

In the Hinkler electorate, only 19.5 per cent of clinics offered bulk-billing, while residents of Flynn could find the service in about a quarter of clinics (23.7 per cent).

Residents of Maranoa, a mammoth electorate which includes parts of the South Burnett, were the best off with 40 per cent of clinics offering the service.

Each of these rates was down on the previous year.

Cleanbill’s report accompanying these figures says the calculated rate is for “all adult patients without concessions” who attend during regular business hours.

The already low rates of clinics offering bulk-billing was made worse for North Burnett and Flynn residents, with the average out-of-pocket costs for a standard consultation at a clinic not offering the service up more than $5 on the previous year.

Cleanbill’s figures say the average out-of-pocket cost for Flynn patients in 2023-24 was $47.87, up from $42.71 in 2022-23.

This was the fourth-highest dollar value increase in the country, Cleanbill’s data says.

Wide Bay patients were now out of pocket an average of $43.41, up $3.14, while those in Hinkler were paying on average $2.43 more with the costs now sitting at $41.32.

Maranoa residents had the cheapest out-of-pocket costs, paying an average of $36.85.

This was only $1.90 higher than in 2022-2023.

An already shrinking number of Wide Bay GP clinics offering bulk billing is getting smaller still with the closure of the Henry Street Medical Centre at the end of February 2024. Cleanbill’s data shows only 7.7 per cent of clinics across the Wide Bay electorate offer bulk billing services.

The continuing drop in the number of clinics offering bulk billing to regional Queensland residents, with Cleanbill saying the report showed “staggering collapses in bulk billing in some electorates over the course of just one year” across the country.

Access to bulk billing in the Wide Bay was unlikely to become easier soon, either, with the closure this month of Gympie’s Henry St Medical Centre, one of the few still offering the service.

One Gympie clinic manager who asked to remain anonymous said the cost for a 15 minute appointment for a patient at their clinic was $96.

Bulk billing would only get the clinic $41 back.
The clinic still offered bulk billing to pensioners and children, for which patients the Medicare rebate rates had been significantly increased by the federal government in November 2023.

There was still strong demand for bulk billing services in the region, she said, with the clinic regularly fielding calls inquiring about what the clinic offered.

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The problem for clinics was they had to face the same cost-of-living frustrations as everyone else did.

“You have to pay for electricity, rent, and upkeep of equipment,” she said.

She said the best solution to reversing the drop in clinics offering bulk billing was the obvious one: Increasing the amount being paid back by the government.

Right now the rebate was “just not meeting CPI”, she said.