Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Senator Stewart, for that supplementary. We have opened 58 Medicare urgent care clinics across Australia. They're now open and seeing patients. Australians can walk in and receive urgent care quickly and for free.

There have been over 494,000 visits to Medicare UCCs across Australia since they opened. We know that one in four visits are from someone aged under 15, over one in three have been outside of regular working hours, and a half of all of those presentations were with people who said that they would otherwise have gone to a hospital emergency department. So not only are people being seen, not only is it free, not only can they walk in and get their kids seen out of hours, we're also making sure that we're taking pressure off busy emergency departments. So Medicare, PBS and Medicare urgent care clinics really show how importantly we regard health—(Time expired.)