Labor's Urgent Care Clinics are a figment of Albo's imagination

Albo is rolling out "Medicare Urgent Care Clinics" across the country with the slogan: "the health care you need, when you need it." But, is he really?

It struck me as odd that we never really get to see these clinics. No videos of politicians in hi-vis vests and hard hats at construction sites, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and no press conferences in front of even a handful of these new clinics. Given the ALP’s penchant for spin, I suspected something was off and decided to dig deeper.

The ALP has a history of rebirthing existing initiatives by giving them a new name and paint-job. Like Labor's much vaunted Fee-Free TAFE which is actually the LNP's JobTrainer program from 2020. I figured these clinics might be following the same playbook, and I wasn’t far off.

I Googled the addresses of the first ten Urgent Care Clinics (UCCs) listed for NSW. The results? Nine had the same address as existing medical centres, and one was located at a hospital. Further investigation revealed that the medical centres WERE the Urgent Care Clinics. They aren’t new clinics—they’re just new names for existing clinics.

The UCCs offer bulk billing with no appointment necessary and are open for extended hours (the healthcare you need when you need it), however on Sydney's Northern Beaches there are no UCCs, but it isn't hard to find a medical center that offers the same services.

Of the 10 UCCs I checked, weekday opening hours were at most 8am to 10pm. The "Our Medical" medical center at Dee Why is open even longer hours, offering bulk billing GPs without the need for an appointment from 7am to 10pm.

In fact, most of the UCCs were only open from 8am to 8pm, with one only open from 8:30am to 5pm - despite the fact that the medical center that operated it was open from 8am to 5:30pm. Albo's "the healthcare you need, when you need it" slogan should really be "the healthcare you need when the medical center is open". Strangely, even the Batemans Bay UCC is only open from 8am to 8pm - despite the fact that the Batemans Bay Hospital that operates it offers 24-hour accident and emergency services.

Generally, the UCCs are open longer hours than the medical centres that operate them, but given how easy it was to find a medical center that's open till late on the Northern Beaches where there are no UCCs, it got me wondering... did these other places with UCCs not already have medical centers that were open late? Surely, they didn't just reduce the normal opening hours of existing medical centers, so that they could claim the UCC was open for extended hours?

I looked at the normal opening hours for the Dapto Medical & Dental Centre from before and after they started operating the Dapto Medicare Urgent Care Clinic on 17 July 2024.

Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, I could see that in March of 2024, normal opening hours for the medical center were 7:00am - 8:00pm and they were already offering Urgent Care from 8:00am to 8:00pm.

After they started operating the Dapto Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, the normal operating hours for the medical center have been reduced and the Urgent Care hours are the same:

This ties in with the opening hours of the Dapto Medicare Urgent Care Clinic:

So, when the Govt says they've "opened a new Urgent Care Clinic for the Illawarra", what they really mean is they've "reduced the normal opening hours of the Dapto Medical & Dental Center". This is some next-level spin.

When searching for an image of a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic for this article, the best I could find was this image of the Beeliar Urgent Care Clinic in Perth proudly boasting "Bulk billing, Open 7 days, After hours."

But when I did a Google street view to get a wider look at the UCC building, what I found instead was an old image capture from February 2021 of the Lagoon Medical Centre boasting Urgent care and "Bulk billing, Open 7 days, After hours."

The only difference being the "Medicare Urgent Care Clinic" sign in the window above the door - which is kind of appropriate if you think about it. The UCCs are literally just window-dressing.

The opening hours for the Lagoon Medical Centre and the Beeliar Urgent Care Clinic are identical. However, one difference I noticed is that the Medical Centre no longer bulk bills, so again it's a case of reducing the services offered by the Medical Centre to make the UCC look better. From what I can see, Labor's Medicare Urgent Care Clinics are a complete con job.