General Practice Trends

General Practitioners (GPs) are playing an increasingly crucial role given they are on the front lines of primary care, which accounts for more than 35 per cent of the health sector’s total $162B expenditure.

At the same time, however, there is less information available about the situation of and outlook for the GP sector.

To that end, ANZ Health has collaborated with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research of The University of Melbourne to produce the ANZ-Melbourne Institute Health Sector Report by Professor Anthony Scott on General Practice trends. The first of an anticipated series, Professor Scott’s work summarises the current context relating to GPs and analyses key trends in the GP sector.

The General Practice report illuminates structural changes in the size and composition of the GP workforce, financial health of GP practices, job satisfaction and work-life balance amongst other trends and developments. Professor Scott is uniquely placed to provide an expert and objective view of the GP sector, given his role in leading the Melbourne Institute’s Health Economics Research Program and the long-running Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life (MABEL) survey of doctors, which has followed around 10,000 doctors since 2008 (approximately 20 per cent of the total population of doctors in Australia).

For more than 50 years, the Melbourne Institute has been Australia’s leading and longest-standing research institute in the field of economics, undertaking cutting-edge research into key issues relevant to contemporary economic and social policy. Medicare (and its predecessor Medibank) was conceived at the Melbourne Institute in the late 1960s by Dick Scotton and John Deeble.