Ask any industry expert, specialist, or allied health provider what has changed in the last few years, and you will get the same answer: getting in front of GPs is harder than ever. It is not because GPs do not want to engage. It is because they would rather not hear the same things they have always heard. And when they are already hard-pressed for time, is it really too much to expect that every visit actually means something?

 

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Why primary care clinics are under pressure

General practice in Australia now carries more than it was ever designed to. An ageing population, rising chronic disease, workforce shortages, and growing compliance obligations have all converged on the same desk. There are now over 40,000 GPs in Australia, yet full-time equivalent numbers per 100,000 people have declined, with government modelling projecting a shortfall of around 8,600 GP full-time equivalents by 2048. Meanwhile, 60% of Australians who saw a GP in 2022-23 had a long-term health condition, and that proportion keeps rising.

Australian general practices are under significant pressure. Patient volumes have increased, and we find it harder to find and retain staff while the administrative load continues to grow. The front desk is busy. The GPs are busier. Many practices have quietly changed how they handle external engagement and are now more selective about who they let through and how.

 

What breaks down without a structured system

The traditional playbook creates problems on both sides. Phone the clinic; hope someone picks up; follow up by email; and show up, hoping the GP is not running behind. Healthcare organisations have no visibility into which GPs are interested, when they are available, or whether a visit even aligns with how the clinic prefers to work. Meanwhile, the front desk becomes an informal gatekeeper for every representative, coordinator, and supplier trying to get through, which is not their role.

The result is a system that works poorly for everyone before you even factor in the missed messages and scheduling confusion that come with managing engagement across email and phone.

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So can a GP engagement platform fix this?

A GP engagement platform provides a structured framework for the relationship between clinics and healthcare organisations. Clinics set their preferences: what engagement they are open to, when, and through what channels. Healthcare organisations see the information and act on it, rather than guessing. In practice, that means: 

 

It does not replace the relationship. It removes the friction that gets in the way of building one.

Why GP clinic visitor management matters more now

Even clinics that want to engage with external organisations struggle with the practicalities. Who is coming in this week? Has it been confirmed? Does the GP know? Without a dedicated system, the front desk handles these questions along with everything else. GP clinic visitor management has become one of the more pressing operational challenges in primary care, particularly in high-volume practices where uncoordinated visits create real disruption to patient flow. When we handle it well, we make visits shorter and better timed and actually reach the right GP.

Connected care and GP referrals

As multidisciplinary care grows across Australian healthcare, coordination between GPs, specialists, and allied health providers needs to keep pace. A patient often moves through the system in a non-linear way. For specialists and allied health providers, that coordination increasingly depends on GP referrals. A specialist referral platform or allied health referral pathway is only as strong as the GP relationships sitting behind it. Structured engagement supports stronger continuity across these networks without adding to the load on clinical teams.

How RxTro works as a GP engagement platform

RxTro is built for exactly these purposes. More than 60,000 Australian health professionals, including GPs, specialists, allied health providers, and hospital teams, use the platform to manage engagement across primary care. For healthcare organisations, it provides a structured way to reach GPs through CPD-accredited sessions, scheduled appointments, and coordinated outreach that clinics have opted into. For clinics, it means visibility and control over who engages with them and how. Less disruption at the front desk. Better conversations with the right GP at the right time.

 

Some changes in healthcare do not come with great fanfare. They quietly hit you and impact the way one operates or how they do referrals, as the case may be.

The changes to the mental health treatment plan under the Better Access initiative, announced by the Australian government's Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, are one such initiative that has made a silent yet impactful entry.

Silently but surely, the initiative cuts a lot of paperwork and admin tasks — and has brought care right back to the general practitioners. But with that simplification comes a shift that is easy to miss: the structured checkpoint that used to prompt GPs to reassess their patients' mental health is no longer built into the system.

Let's explore what the changes are and how they will impact GPs, specialists, and especially patients.

 

What has actually changed

The checkpoints and pathways

If you are a general practitioner with a focus or special interest in mental health, you are familiar with the process. You fill in the mental health treatment plan, patients access Medicare-subsidised psychological services through it, and the referral process goes on as before with all the necessary paperwork.

With the new changes to MHTP, what has been removed are the MBS review items. Originally, these review items brought patients back to their GP after some sessions with a psychologist to review whether the treatment was working. That clinical reassessment is no longer a formal, built-in step.

 

Another shift lies within the consultation itself.

There is also a more practical tension emerging for GPs around how mental health care is now billed and structured within everyday consultations.

Previously, formal MHTP review items created a clearer framework around follow-up. Under the new model, reviews are expected to occur through standard time-tiered attendance items instead. In principle, this provides GPs more flexibility to respond to clinical need rather than fixed review points.

In practice, however, mental health consultations do not always fit neatly into shorter appointment structures.

An MHTP review may involve reassessing symptoms, discussing progress, coordinating referrals, reviewing psychologist feedback, adjusting treatment goals, and documenting ongoing care. Now, individual clinicians play a larger role in deciding which attendance item best reflects that work and in ensuring the consultation is appropriately documented.

Some GPs have also raised concerns that shorter time-tiered attendance items may not fully reflect the complexity involved in mental health reviews.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has advised GPs to use the attendance item that best reflects the complexity and time involved. But for many practices, the new system introduces a layer of judgement and workflow consideration that previously sat more clearly within the dedicated MHTP review structure.


Who does this affect

GPs, specialists, and patients – all three feel it differently

The MHTP pathway navigates from GPs to specialists, with patients forming the major stakeholders in it all. The referrer and the referee need to be in coordination with the treatment plan for it to take effect — and that's precisely why we need to understand how these changes will impact each group.

 

Pros & Cons

Are MHTPs good or detrimental for patients?

MHTPs are still a strong foundation for mental health care. But without structured reviews, the system now relies more on coordination, and that's where challenges can arise.

 

Maintaining continuity of care

How practices can maintain continuity of care

While the MBS changes may have made things easier for GPs and primary care — less admin, no heavy paperwork moving between providers — the challenge that remains is continuity of care.

As the two case studies show, outcomes don't depend on the framework. They depend on the patient. A self-motivated, self-aware patient may come in for a review after seeing a specialist. Another, just as deserving of care, may not.

That's the gap. And this is not a system that closes automatically. The advantages and challenges of the post-2025 MHTP changes lie not in the framework itself, but in what happens inside the practice after the referral. Where an internal follow-up approach exists, continuity of care holds regardless of whether the patient raises concerns. Where it does not support, care becomes dependent on the patient's own initiative, and that's an uneven foundation for mental health support.

So the real question for practices is not whether to follow up, but it's how to build a system that ensures follow-up happens consistently, regardless of whether the patient initiates it.

 

How RxTro supports continuity of care 

The current MBS changes to MHTP pose a challenge not just for the referral alone, but for all parties concerned. It's what comes after and what happens during the process. RxTro does not change how care is delivered. It makes it easier to stay connected while it's underway. For practices building their own follow-up approach, this visibility makes the difference.  

With RxTro, practices can: 

• Refer patients and book appointments directly through their EMR and ensure patients leave with a confirmed appointment; no admin chase needed

• Stay in clearer communication with mental health providers after the referral, not just at the point of it

• See where patients are in their care journey without relying on manual tracking

• Build follow-up visibility into how the practice runs, not as an extra step

Referrals are a core part of how healthcare works in Australia.

They connect general practice to specialist care, quietly, routinely, and often without much attention.

But if you stop and think about it for a moment, there’s a simple question that doesn’t always have a clear answer:

What actually happens after a referral is sent?

On paper, it’s straightforward. A GP identifies the need, sends the referral, and the patient moves forward.

In reality, it’s a bit messier than that.

A referral might be received and actioned straight away. Or it might sit in an inbox for a while. Sometimes it needs a follow-up. Occasionally, it never quite turns into an appointment at all.

And most of the time, no one really knows, or at least not until a patient calls back to check what’s going on.

If you’ve ever had to ring a specialist clinic just to confirm whether something was received, you’ll know how common such situations are.

In most cases, it’s not that the system fails. It’s that no one has full clarity or visibility of it end-to-end.

 

What this looks like in Practice

 

Before getting into what can be done to improve things, let's step back for a second to see what statistics say:

• Around 40% of Australians see a specialist each year, usually through GP-led pathways
• Close to 1 in 5 people delay or miss specialist care when they need it
• Wait times can range from a few weeks to several months, depending on the service

The pattern becomes clearer when we look at this chart:

Ref: Patient Experiences, 2024-25 financial year | Australian Bureau of Statistics

As patients age, reliance on specialist care increases, thereby highlighting the importance of clear, well-functioning referral pathways between GPs and specialists.

But while this pathway becomes more critical over time, what happens between each step isn’t always visible.

So if you’re trying to increase referrals, what actually helps?

It’s easy to assume the answer is more outreach. More networking. More visibility with local clinics.

And yes, that plays a role.

But in practice, referrals tend to follow something much simpler.

If a GP knows a process works consistently, they're far more likely to come back to it.

So it’s worth looking at what actually makes these pathways work.

 

Where referral pathways usually break and how to fix them

In most cases, it’s not one big issue. It’s a series of small gaps that add up over time.

 

1. Make it easy to refer — genuinely easy

 

Most GPs aren’t comparing multiple specialists in detail.

They’re making decisions in the middle of a busy clinic, often between patients.

Even small inconsistencies like different forms, unclear instructions, or extra steps can make the process harder than it needs to be.

And friction, even small amounts, changes behaviour.

Clarity and consistency matter more than optimisation.

That’s usually enough to make you the default choice — especially when GPs know they can rely on the experience each time.

2. Let clinics know it’s been received

 

Silence is one of the biggest issues here.

Something is sent… and then nothing.

From the GP’s side, that creates uncertainty. Was it received? Is it being actioned?

Even a simple acknowledgement helps.

A small signal can prevent a lot of follow-up.

It also reassures clinics that there’s an active process on the other end — not just a one-way handoff.

 

3. Close the loop after the patient is seen

 

Once the patient has been seen, communication tends to drop off. This part is often overlooked. 

But for GPs, this stage is where clarity matters most. A short summary. A clear next step.

Referrals aren’t just transactional. They’re relational.

When GPs consistently hear back and feel included in the patient’s journey, trust builds over time, and that’s what drives repeat referrals.

 

4. Look at how things are handled once they arrive

 

Not all delays come from outside the system.

Sometimes the bottleneck is internal: requests sitting in inboxes, delays in triaging, or unclear responsibility for follow-up. None of these are major issues on their own. But together, they add friction that patients and referring clinics both feel, even if they can't quite name it.

 

A more consistent internal flow removes uncertainty.

And when things are easier to manage internally, the experience becomes more predictable for the clinics referring to it.

 

5. Make the process visible (& not just communicative)

 

Effective communication tells people what happened. Visibility shows them what's happening now.

Has the referral been received? Is it waiting to be reviewed? Has the patient been booked?

Without that, everything becomes just reactive. GPs follow up, patients call to check, and clinics spend time chasing rather than caring.

Visibility reduces chasing, duplication, and delays.

And when GPs don’t have to follow up or guess what’s happening, they’re much more likely to trust and 'reuse' the same pathway.

 

6. Don’t lose sight of the patient experience

The patient is at the centre of all these discussions.

Patients don't see whether a referral was received or triaged. They just feel the delay. That uncertainty shapes how patients view the specialist and the GP who referred them.

When the experience is smooth, trust builds across the entire pathway.

And often, that’s what keeps referrals consistent over time. Patients feel more confident. They're more likely to follow through, return, and recommend.

 

To sum up...

Referrals are a routine part of care, but what happens after they’re sent is what shapes the outcome.

When pathways are clearer, the process becomes easier to trust. And when engagement with GPs is consistent, that trust builds over time. Together, those two things make a noticeable difference. 

Not just in how smoothly patients move through care, but in how reliably referrals continue to flow.

Improving referrals often comes down to making the process clearer and staying connected with the GPs you work with.

At RxTro, we focus on helping providers establish more consistent referral pathways.