28/09/2025
The past 2 years have seen the continuing emergence of Urgent Care Clinics in Australia. I have been fascinated to work in many.
Here’s a throwback to my , when I learned how Urgent Care Clinics work in the US.
✅ In the US, “urgent” can mean anything that’s emerged in the past two weeks.
✅ Their clinics are usually stand-alone (shopping centres, schools, football fields!) but still part of larger corporate hospital networks.
✅ Here in Australia, Urgent Care Clinics are more often located in existing general practices. - it can be hard to tell the difference between everyday GP care and urgent care.
My observations from the past 2 years working across Australia with our Australian Urgent Care Clinics.
🫥 Funding is a key difference — and often a point of contention.
🫥 In some towns, the new Urgent Care Clinic is the only available option for care.
🫥 Managing patient demand is challenging, particularly given the lack of clarity around what qualifies as ‘urgent care.’
🫥 With less general practices now bulk billing, Reception staff of Urgent Care Clinics face added pressure, with financially struggling patients insisting on being seen for non-urgent care.
It’s been fascinating to see how models evolve across countries — and to watch Australia work to adapt the concept to fit our health system.
It’s always fascinating to study overseas models. Equally fascinating to study how differently leaders across Australia can implement a new initiative. 🌏💡
final days.
It was a rare and wonderful opportunity to spend time with a ‘Practice Manager’ and hear how she manages the Urgent Care Clinic.
5 Key learnings:
1. Their definition of an ‘urgent’ presentation is anything that has emerged in the past 2 weeks.
2. Nurse Practitioners run the clinic (2 rostered on at all times). They triage, diagnose, prescribe - ‘write the orders’.
3. Medical Assistants then receive the ‘orders’ and follow those (with limitations) doing procedures, administering medication, writing ‘excuse notes’ etc.
4. Urgent Care Clinics are commonly stand-alone and in shopping centres or, as in this case, at a high school football field. They are however mostly part of a larger organisation. In this case it is Advent Health. The larger organisations include a major hospital, primary care and all other specialties and all are commonly co-located with the hospital. This means Urgent Care is commonly referring to one location if the patient needs follow-up.
5. Advent Health uses ‘Epic’ software which allows sharing between all their 300+ facilities (2000+ providers) as well as some other corporates eg Harbin Clinic (20 locations, 200 providers) - where I’ve also done a tour and interview.
I’ve also been asking tons of HR related questions which I will share in my article. Let me know if there’s anything else you’re interested to learn more about.
Huge thanks to Kayla and her team from Advent Urgent Care Calhoun for the tour and answering all my questions.
