Effect of Urgent Care Centres on Emergency Department attendance and timeliness

Authors: Peter Bristow1, Sabrina Lenzen1 and Luke Connelly1

Affiliations:

  1. Centre for the Business and Economics of Health, The University of Queensland

The following is a summary of an oral presentation at the 2025 AHES Conference: https://ahes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/AHES-Annual-Conference-2025-Abstracts-Booklet_final.pdf

Access to timely emergency department (ED) care is a growing international concern, with delays associated with adverse health outcomes, including higher mortality rates. In Australia, more patients are waiting to be seen longer than clinically recommended, more are ramped waiting in ambulances, and more are spending more than 4 hours in the ED before being discharged or admitted.

In 2023, the Commonwealth government began the rollout of 87 Medicare Urgent Care Centres (UCCs) to reduce ED congestion by diverting patients with less serious conditions to primary care-based settings.  Similar initiatives have been introduced in New South Wales, while Queensland opened Minor Injury and Illness Clinics across the South East.

Using publicly available data, we studied whether these Urgent Care Centres reduced ED presentations, and improved key performance indicators such as waiting time and length of stay in ED. We found a modest reduction in semi-urgent (category 4) ED presentations, with 77 fewer per quarter representing a 1.7% reduction. However, this equates to less than one patient per day per quarter and did not translate into measurable improvements in the proportion of patients waiting longer than recommended, or those with ED stays under 4 hours.

Based on recent published data, we estimated that operating each clinic was associated with an additional cost of approximately $A500,000 per quarter, even after accounting for the fewer patients presenting to EDs. Furthermore, the establishment of UCCs did not lead to an increase in general practice (GP) service utilisation, including services provided through the new clinics themselves. Taken together, our findings suggest that UCC visits primarily substituted for other GP consultations rather than ED presentations.

Given the limited impact on ED congestion and the additional costs incurred, we recommend that other strategies to improve ED access should be considered rather than opening further UCCs.

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