News / Health
PM opens new Coburg urgent care clinic
Sydney Road facility will begin seeing patients for free on Monday
Mark Phillips
BRUNSWICK and Coburg residents will be able to avoid long waits in public hospital emergency departments with the opening of a new Medicare Urgent Care Clinic on Monday.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese cut a ribbon to open the clinic during a brief visit to Coburg on Saturday afternoon and it will begin seeing patients from 8am on Monday.
The clinic, located on Sydney Road in the Coburg shopping strip, will treat up to 60 patients a day, allowing people with urgent but non-life threatening medical conditions to see a doctor without an appointment.
It will also take pressure off hospital emergency departments, reducing waiting times and saving money.
Albanese announced an expansion of the Medicare Urgent Care Clinic program, including the Coburg location, during last year’s federal election campaign.
He pledged to deliver 50 new clinics to take the total around the country to 137 under the $644 million plan to ensure 80% of Australians have access to bulk-billed urgent medical care within a 20 minute drive of their home.
The Brunswick clinic joins an existing network of 28 clinics in Victoria and follows the opening of a venue in Northcote in January.
Quick facts
What is a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic?
Doctors are available to treat urgent but non-life threatening illnesses and injuries without an appointment. This will reduce pressure on public hospital emergency departments and allow patients to be treated quicker than they would at a hospital, where priority is given to acute and life-threatening conditions. The service is fully-bulk billed and free.
Where is the clinic?
The new clinic is located at 444 Sydney Road, on the eastern side of the road a few hundred metres south of Bell Street.
When is the clinic open?
The clinic will be open from 8am to 10pm, seven days a week, including public holidays.
Albanese joined the Member for Wills, Peter Khalil, and the Assistant Minister for Social Services & the Prevention of Family Violence, Ged Kearney, to open the new clinic.
He was greeted with a cake bearing the images of himself and of Bob Hawke, who established Medicare in his first term as Prime Minister in 1984.
Brandishing a green Medicare card, Albanese noted there was a historical symmetry to his visit to Wills, which was also Hawke’s electorate.
“We remember one of the great legacies of the Hawke government was the creation of Medicare,” he said.
“And what it needed was a long term Labor Government to entrench it because we know that Gough Whitlam created Medibank but it was destroyed by a coalition incoming government, and it was only Bob Hawke winning four elections and then Paul Keating winning the 1993 election that entrenched Medicare as a permanent feature of our health system.”
Above: “We remember one of the great legacies of the Hawke government was the creation of Medicare,” said Albanese.
Khalil said the roll out of the Urgent Care Clinic network across Australia would be seen by future generations as one the great achievements of Albanese’s government.
“Every person I speak to out there on Sydney Road when I say we’re opening up this new Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, their eyes light up, they say this is fantastic,” he said.
“We need this, being able to get this kind of non-life threatening but urgent care late at night, or on weekends is a must for this community.”
The Coburg clinic will ease pressure on the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s emergency department, where about 29 per cent of presentations in 2024-25 were for semi-urgent or non-urgent conditions.
The new clinic is at 444 Sydney Road, just south of Bell Street. It was previously used as a bank.
The clinic will be operated by ForHealth, a private company that has scores of GP, dental and other general medical clinics around Australia. ForHealth manages 53 urgent care clinics around Australia with funding from the federal or state governments.
It will be open from 8am to 10pm every day of the week, including public holidays, will treat a range of injuries and illnesses, including minor infections, sprains and sports injuries, minor cuts, insect bites and rashes, mild burns, respiratory problems and gastroenteritis.
It will be fully bulk-billed so patients have no out-of-pocket expenses.
The CEO of ForHealth, Andrew Cohen, said the Coburg clinic would initially be staffed with two nurses and one doctor but would quickly ramp up as demand grew. In addition to more urgent care staff, a free by-appointment General Practice clinic will also open on the first floor of the building later this year.
He said that based on other similar clinics that ForHealth manages, once it was at full operation it was likely the Coburg clinic would see about 22,000 patients a year.
Cohen said the urgent care clinic sat in the space between a General Practice and the emergency department of a hospital, allowing people to bypass their normal doctor when they had an illness or injury that needed treatment immediately.
He said ForHealth’s data showed that half of the patients who present at the centres it operates would have had to attend a hospital emergency department if the urgent care clinic did not exist.
“A General Practitioner will deal with continuous care, often preventative care and day to day issues, while urgent care is something episodic that needs to be seen straight away,” he said.
“But in a General Practice you will need to make an appointment and there may be a long wait for that to occur. And a lot of [medical] issues happen outside of normal [GP] hours.
“This gives people access to a doctor when they need it and takes the pressure off the hospital system.
“You will be able to come here when it’s urgent, but not acute and not life-threateningw with a broken arm, or a bad gash, or something in your eye and get treated on the spot.”
Above: Khalil took the opportunity to have his blood pressure checked, watched by Kearney, a former nurse.
Cohen said the urgent care clinics had high use by children and elderly patients.
“With children or an elderly family member, you want it it sorted out immediately and want it to be seen and not sit in a hsopital for six hours when the less acute cases get prioritised down the line because they’re triaging the more serious cases as they should be,” he said.
“But in an urgent care clinic you will be seen within 30 minutes.”
Cohen said people with serious or life threatening conditions like a heart attack or a stroke should still seek care at a hospital.
But he said urgent care clinics worked closely with hospitals, and if someone presented with a more serious condition the clinic would arrange for them to be transferred to a hospital emergency department for rapid assessment, by ambulance if necessary.
The Medicare Urgent Care Clinics have already seen more than 2.7 million presentations since the first sites opened in June 2023, including more than 565,900 in Victoria.
More than a quarter of these were patients aged under 15 years old, more than one in four were on weekends, and 25% were weekday after hours visits.
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