Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

We are expanding the availability of free urgent health care. There are now 122 Medicare urgent care clinics open across Australia. Australians have made more than two million visits to Labor's free Medicare urgent care clinics. One-third of those patients are kids under the age of 15. Think about all those mums and dads who've been able to go there rather than to the hospital to get support for their children.

Nearly half of the patients who attended a Medicare urgent care clinic would have used a hospital emergency department if no clinic were available. Thirty per cent of visits to Medicare urgent care clinics have taken place on weekends; 25 per cent of patients have attended after 5 pm on weekdays. These clinics are filling a gap in our health system that those opposite did absolutely nothing to address.