Susan Templeman MP - Federal Member for Macquarie

Opinion

Picture this: your four year old grandchild trips over while you’re looking after her. She’s OK but the cut is deep and it’s been a little while and the bleeding isn’t stopping. It’s 6pm so your local GP is going to be either booked or closed. 

The closest after-hours service is privately run and going to cost a pretty penny, and you dread the thought of going and waiting in Emergency where there will be other more serious needs. You know you could make a phone call and get advice, but you really just want to jump in the car and drive to a doctor close by. Right now.

That’s exactly what you’d be able to do if there was a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic in the Hawkesbury.

Since the closure of the After Hours GP Clinic at Hawkesbury Hospital, under the Liberal’s watch, after hours care has been even harder to get and more expensive. 

Our new Medicare Urgent Care Clinics provide medical care in urgent, but not life-threatening, situations.

They’re open for extended hours, including weekends.

You don’t need an appointment.

The services, including x-rays or scans and blood tests, are fully bulk-billed, with no out of pocket costs.

The other positive is that they take pressure off emergency departments and the hard-working staff we have there.

We’ve opened 87 of them and I’ve seen the benefits of the Penrith Urgent Care Clinic. 

People have told me that that it’s been a quick and efficient visit, that it saved them hours waiting in emergency to check out a possible fracture, and that having everything covered my Medicare was most welcome.

That’s why I’m calling on the Federal Government to open a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic here, in the Hawkesbury.

You can help me show it’s needed by signing my petition and sharing with me your example of how it could help you and your family.

An Urgent Care Clinic would build on the improvements we’ve made to making Medicare stronger in the Hawkesbury. 

We have the Medicare Mental Health Service in Richmond providing free mental health care. We have Headspace, providing targeted support and prevention services for young people’s mental wellbeing. And we have the Endometriosis and Pelvic Pain clinic in Rouse Hill, the first in the west to give women access a dedicated care and treatment options.

And we’ve turned around the falling levels of bulk-billing by tripling the bulk-billing incentive for GPs. 

In Macquarie, 82.8% of all GP visits are bulk-billed since our additional investment in Medicare took effect, which means there have been more than 30,000 additional bulk-billed visits to the doctor in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury.

And since the Albanese Government was elected, 32 new GPs have started billing Medicare locally.

On top of that, Macquarie residents have saved more than $6.2 million on 695,000 scripts because we’ve made medicines cheaper by cutting their cost, lowering the Safety Net threshold and introducing 60-day prescriptions.

These are significant steps forward in less than three years, and I look forward to Labor continuing to work hard to strengthen Medicare.

Help me keep fighting for improvements to Medicare in the Hawkesbury by supporting an Urgent Care Clinic by signing the petition https://susantempleman.com.au/hawkesbury-urgent-care-clinic/