Health Minister’s dire warning about the general practitioner shortage in Australia

Australians already struggling to find a doctor have been warned that things are about to get “frighteningly” worse.

Australia’s general practitioner shortage will worsen in coming years, with the federal health minister issuing a “frightening” warning.

Health Minister Mark Butler and the former president of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) Mukesh Haikerwal faced questions about the scarcity of doctors across the nation while on ABC TV’s QandA.

The questions follow a 2022 report by the AMA projected that Australia will face a “staggering shortage” of 10,600 GPs by 2031.

Mr Butler said Australia’s medical system needed to reflect “patients in the 2020s not the 1980s”.

Mr Haikerwal urged the government to do more to attract young medical students to general practice to help fix the shortage of doctors. Photo: ABC

Mr Butler said Medicare needed to be overhauled as the current system was “designed for the 1980s and the health needs of the country are very different”, before issuing a warning of what’s to come for Australia’s medical system.

“I mean if only one in seven medical graduates are choosing general practice as their preferred career instead of one in two, which is what it was not too long ago, if you think it’s hard to find a doctor now, in five or 10 years when the current generation has retired, it will be a real problem,” he warned.

“Every fail in the health system around the community, it all ends up in the emergency department crowding out an already very stressed hospital system.”

The panel also faced questions about the cost of visiting the doctor, with Dr Haikerwal defending the dwindling availability of bulk billing doctors as a systemic issue rather than the choice of GPs.

Mr Butler told the audience they can expect an announcement around the medical system in the upcoming budget. Photo: ABC

“General practice is a small business and it’s important that we stay afloat to be able to provide these services … what we have tried to do amongst the practices is to see how we can provide those services and their practices, like mine, do have times when we are not charging out of pocket but there are times when we have to,” he said.

He also said the decrease in the number of medical graduates choosing to become a GP had limited the supply of doctors, driving up the price.

Mr Butler urged young medical professionals to consider general practice, vowing that the Albanese government will do more to make it more attractive.

“The last 15 years have seen, I think, a devaluing of the role of general practice which is the backbone of our healthcare system,” he said.

“We’ve got to make it a financially more attractive proposition than it is and that goes really back to that point that Mukesh made and the response that we intend to roll out in coming days and weeks.”