What are the Medicare menopause health assessment items?

From 1 July 2025, two new MBS items (695 and 19000) allow GPs to conduct a dedicated menopause and perimenopause health assessment. Item 695 is for GPs, and item 19000 applies in specific circumstances including specialist consultations. The assessment covers symptom history, cardiovascular and bone health considerations, and management options including menopausal hormone therapy and non-hormonal approaches. Nearly 105,000 women accessed these items in the first year. Ask your GP whether a menopause health assessment is appropriate for your situation.

What symptoms does perimenopause actually cover?

The perimenopause transition typically spans several years before the final menstrual period and can include irregular cycles, hot flushes or sudden warmth, night sweats, sleep disruption, mood changes (including anxiety and low mood), brain fog or difficulty concentrating, fatigue, joint achiness, and vaginal and urinary symptoms. Not every woman experiences all of these, and the severity ranges widely. Many of these symptoms overlap with conditions such as thyroid dysfunction, anxiety disorders, and iron deficiency — which is one reason a structured GP assessment is useful.

Australia's first perimenopause campaign — what it means at your GP visit

What just happened

In late May 2026, the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care launched the country’s first national campaign on perimenopause and menopause — titled “Could This Be Perimenopause?” — across television, out-of-home advertising, social media, and a new information hub at health.gov.au/perimenopause.

The campaign follows directly from the 2024 Senate Inquiry into issues related to menopause and perimenopause, which found that many women felt uninformed, dismissed, and unprepared as they moved through this transition. It targets women aged 35 to 55 and aims to change the framing — from a silent, vaguely embarrassing passage of life to something that has a name, symptoms that can be recognised, and a clinical support pathway.

The Australasian Menopause Society (AMS) welcomed the campaign, with AMS President Christina Jang describing it as responding directly to what women told the Senate Inquiry about feeling unsupported and uninformed at midlife. The AMS is also developing updated position statements on menopause care in Australia, starting with the Medicare menopause health assessment items (MBS items 695 and 19000) introduced in July 2025.

Nearly 105,000 women accessed those MBS items in the first year after their introduction — a number that suggests demand for structured perimenopausal care in general practice was already there before any national campaign launched.

For the woman who has been waking at 3 am with a racing heart, losing words mid-sentence at work, and been told — perhaps by herself, perhaps by someone else — that this is just stress, or just getting older: the campaign is the first time a national public voice has said plainly that there is a clinical language for what might be happening.

The both-and

This campaign names something that has been systematically unnamed. That matters. It also cannot substitute for the clinical infrastructure, GP training, and consultation time needed to make that naming actionable.

What the campaign gets right

Perimenopause has been under-recognised in clinical settings — and not just in Australia. Research published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2026 tracking menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) dispensing over a decade found a significant rise in use of transdermal preparations — associated with a lower venous thromboembolic risk than oral forms — suggesting women have been finding their way to treatment, often through private specialists or proactive GPs, rather than through a coherent system.

The Senate Inquiry also surfaced a confronting statistic: women aged 50 to 54 have the highest suicide rate among Australian women. The proximity of that figure to the peak of perimenopausal mood disruption, sleep fragmentation, and cognitive fog is not coincidental. One of the things that goes wrong in the absence of a clinical language is that women seek explanations for what they are experiencing — and the explanations they find (anxiety disorder, depression, burnout, hypothyroidism) can delay appropriate care by years.

The campaign’s core contribution is to put the question into the room before the appointment. Symptoms the campaign highlights — brain fog, sudden sweats, sleep disruption, anxiety, fatigue — are the same symptoms that bring women into general practice and are frequently attributed to other conditions first. The campaign gives women a phrase to carry into that consultation.

What the campaign cannot do alone

A national advertising initiative changes the first step: it raises the possibility. It does not ensure that every GP is equipped to take that conversation somewhere clinically useful. The MBS menopause assessment items create a billing framework for a structured consultation — which is genuine progress — but only within practices where GPs are already engaged with this area of women’s health.

The campaign also does not resolve the urban and rural access divide, the variable knowledge base across the general practice workforce on MHT prescribing and monitoring, or the continued gap in awareness about non-hormonal management options with an evidence base — including psychological approaches for mood symptoms and sleep disruption.

There is also a knowledge hazard on the patient side. The campaign runs in a media environment where perimenopause has become something of a wellness content category, with considerable misinformation about symptoms, timelines, treatments, and risks circulating on social media and in commercial health spaces. Resources built from clinical guidelines rather than commercial interests — like the health.gov.au/perimenopause hub — are a useful counterweight, but they require people to find them.

2 cents

If you have been experiencing symptoms that might fit the perimenopause picture — irregular cycles, sleep disruption, hot flushes or sudden warmth, brain fog, mood shifts, joint achiness, fatigue — the campaign has created a legitimate opening for a specific GP conversation. A menopause health assessment through your regular GP, using the MBS items available since July 2025, is a structured way to approach this as a clinical question rather than a lifestyle management problem.

Bringing a symptom diary — even a rough one — to that appointment is useful. How long, how frequent, how much they’re affecting work, sleep, and relationships. That information helps your GP contextualise the presentation, consider whether other conditions are part of the picture (thyroid function, iron stores, and mood disorders can all overlap with perimenopause symptoms and are worth assessing), and discuss the current evidence on management options.

The health.gov.au/perimenopause hub is a reasonable starting point for orientation before any clinical conversation.

This is general health information and does not constitute individual clinical advice.

Verdict

Verdict: yes — worth knowing about.

The national campaign is a genuine cultural shift — the first time government resources have been applied to making perimenopause visible and talkable. For the woman who has been managing unexplained midlife symptoms in the dark, it opens a door. For GPs, it signals that more patients will arrive with this question, and that some preparation for the consultation is useful. The infrastructure to match that demand — training, time, and specialist access — is the next piece that needs to follow.

If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available 24/7: Lifeline 13 11 14 · Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636 · 13YARN 13 92 76.