Overview

Primary care is often the first contact a person has with the health system and can be delivered in a range of settings, by a range of providers.

It may be provided by general practitioners (GPs) within general practice or in an aged care or community setting, by public or private service providers. Nursing care, midwifery, pharmacy, dentistry, Aboriginal health services, and allied health care are also examples of primary care services.

Featured summary

In 2022-23, 86% of Australians had at least one Medicare-subsidised GP attendance
In 2022–23, there were around 197 million Medicare-subsidised primary care services in Australia
In 2022-23, 39% of Australians received a Medicare-subsidised allied health service administered in primary care settings
In 2021–22, approximately one-third ($84.1 billion) of all health spending in Australia was for primary care

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Latest findings

After-hours GP attendance use was higher in metropolitan PHN areas (20% of people) than regional areas (9.3%) in 2022–23

In 2022–23 there were over 4.8 million GP attendances to residential aged care settings (17 per patient)

The proportion of people who received a Medicare-subsidised specialist attendance ranged from 14% to 41% across PHNs

5,563 practices using 9 different CIS types from the increasingly diverse software ecosystem contributed to these data

425 data extracts were excluded due to data quality issues from the software version used (411) or technical issues (14)

55.9% of regular clients aged 65 years and over had an influenza vaccination recorded in their GP records