Point Clare: GP practice manager Claudia Jeffrey, 31, sentenced for defrauding Medicare

As a universal health care system Medicare relies on the integrity of the professionals who use it. A GP centre manager abused that trust to fund her chronic gambling addiction, a court has heard.

A GP practice manager has been sentenced to the equivalent of jail for defrauding Medicare of more than $338,000 to fund her gambling addiction.

But it was another penalty imposed by a judge that will stay with her for many more years to come, a court has heard.

Claudia Natasha Jeffrey, of Point Clare, faced Gosford District Court on Friday where she was sentenced to an intensive correction order for three years after pleading guilty to two counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception.

An ICO is considered by the courts as the equivalent of a jail sentence but it is served in the community.

The 31-year-old was also ordered to perform 120 hours of community service, keep up her gambling and mental health counselling, not download any gambling apps on her phone and not step foot in up to 70 venues she has already self-excluded herself from attending.

SJeffrey has already self-excluded herself from 70 venues. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

But it was one final order — that she pay back the government $338,789.50 — which could pose the biggest hurdle of all to overcome.

An agreed set of facts states Jeffrey started working as a practice manager for a couple of Sydney doctors in 2016 who had rooms at Cronulla, Woonona, Goulburn and Pyrmont before she started using their provider numbers to claim fake appointments.

Woonona Medical Centre at 44 Hopetoun St where Claudia Natasha Jeffrey worked as a practice manager. Picture: Google Maps

Jeffrey’s fraud only came to light after a routine audit in 2021 linked her Point Clare address to the bogus appointments and discovered she had been paying the Medicare rebate directly into her own bank account.

In May 2021 the Department of Health and Aged Care, which administered the Medicare payments, sent Jeffrey’s medical centre a letter asking why it had made so many claims for melanoma and biopsies but never sent any accompanying specimens to pathology.

Jeffrey, whose job included collecting the mail, opened the letter and called her boss to confess.

“The offender then made admissions about what she had been doing in terms of fraud she had been engaging in, while in his employment, in that she had been making false claims for Medicare benefits using [his] provider number,” the facts state.

Jeffrey started on the pokies as an 18-year-old before progressing to sports betting and horse racing.

All up between June 5, 2017 and May 11, 2021 Jeffrey fraudulently claimed 884 appointments equating to six-figure total she will be forced to pay back.

The court heard she spent the overwhelming majority of the ill-gotten money on gambling rather than any sort of “extravagant lifestyle”.

Claudia Natasha Jeffrey (left), 31, of Point Clare, leaving Gosford District Court after pleading guilty to defrauding Medicare $338,000. Picture: NewsLocal

Judge David Wilson said the breach of trust “strikes at the heart of Medicare” which relied on the integrity of medical professionals who administered it.

“This offending is extremely serious, made more so by the quantum of the amount involved and the time over which the offending took place,” he said.

Judge Wilson said Jeffrey started gambling on pokies aged 18 before progressing to sports betting and horse racing.

He said it quickly “got out of hand” and she became trapped in a vicious cycle where she would gamble to escape the mental hardships of her past, only to feel worse and then gamble more to “chase her losses”.

However he said she had undertaken significant steps to rehabilitate, including self-excluding from 70 venues and attending dozens of gambling counselling sessions.