Claire Clutterham (Sturt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 17 December 2025, a new Medicare urgent care clinic opened in a suburb of Norwood, in my electorate of Sturt, providing the people of Sturt with free and accessible urgent medical care.

When I recently met with staff members Dr Max Adams and nurse Kirsten to ask how the clinic was going, they told me that, since opening, approximately 40 patients a day had sought and received care, and that of those 40 patients, 75 per cent would probably have had to seek treatment at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Urgent care clinics work by taking the strain off the hospital system. They take away the stress, time and uncertainty of attending a hospital emergency room, and they mean that people who need non-life-threatening urgent care can get it. People like Janet and Peter, who live in Kensington Gardens. When I doorknocked them last week, they told me they had received prompt and quality care when Janet, who is in a wheelchair due to MS, suffered an injury to her ankle, requiring stitches. Or like Hermione, who wrote to me and said:

… my daughter used the walk in Medicare clinic at Norwood on NYE. It was great. She got the high quality care she needed in a timely fashion without sitting around in emergency for hours.

Hermione, like the more than one million visitors to urgent care clinics across Australia, understands that taking the strain off hospitals is what urgent care clinics are all about.