Why do GPs struggle with disability care for adults?

Medical training in Australia covers disability almost exclusively in the context of paediatric development — genetic conditions, developmental milestones, early intervention. Once a patient turns 18, the curriculum largely ends. Adults with intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, or complex neurodevelopmental conditions continue to have significant health needs — often more complex than the general population — but their GPs frequently haven't been equipped to address those needs confidently. Add the administrative burden of NDIS paperwork, which requires GPs to complete detailed reports without having been involved in the system's design, and you have a structural mismatch between what GPs are expected to do and what they've been prepared to do.

What can patients with disability do if their GP seems uncomfortable with their care needs?

Seeking a GP with a stated interest in disability medicine is a reasonable first step — some general practices advertise specific expertise in this area. RACGP Specific Interests groups, including the Disability interest group, can help identify practitioners. Some states and territories also have specialist intellectual disability health services that can work with GPs to provide a shared-care model. If you are an NDIS participant, your support coordinator may be able to help identify health practitioners with disability-specific experience. The most important thing is that the discomfort a GP feels about disability care should not translate into dismissal or inadequate assessment — if it does, seeking a second opinion is appropriate.

Most GPs are not comfortable with disability care — a fixable gap

What just happened

A newsGP poll published 26 June 2026 has put a number on something that clinicians working in disability health have known for years: most GPs in Australia do not feel equipped to provide disability care. Sixty per cent of respondents said they were “not at all comfortable” managing disability-related health needs. Thirty-one per cent felt “somewhat comfortable.” Just 8 per cent felt “very comfortable.”

That 60 per cent figure is worth sitting with. Disability affects a large proportion of Australians — AIHW data consistently shows around one in five Australians lives with some form of disability — and general practice is, for most of them, the first and most consistent health touchpoint. If the majority of GPs are not comfortable providing that care, the care is not being provided to the standard those patients deserve.

Dr Maya Luks, a GP who runs a multidisciplinary disability clinic in Adelaide and is a member of RACGP Specific Interests Disability, is pointed about the origin of the gap: “Very little is ever taught about disabilities from age 18 onwards” in Australian medical training. The NDIS compounds the problem in its own way. GPs are routinely asked by support workers, patients, and families to complete complex NDIS documentation, assessments, and review letters — yet, as Dr Luks notes, “GPs have been cut out of having any input into the design of the NDIS, yet we are asked on a daily basis by support workers…to complete paperwork.” Unpaid administrative labour, for a system designed without GP input, by clinicians who were not trained for this cohort.

The both-and

This is a structural failure, not a personal one

The 60 per cent discomfort figure is striking, but the instinct to read it as a reflection on individual GPs misses the point. GPs cannot teach themselves what medical school did not cover. The curriculum gap is real and documented: in Australian medical training, disability is covered almost exclusively through a paediatric lens — developmental milestones, genetic syndromes, early intervention. The assumption built into that curriculum structure is that disability care ends at eighteen. It does not.

Adults with intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, and complex neurodevelopmental presentations continue to require ongoing, often complex, medical care well into adulthood and old age. They are also a population with substantially elevated health risk: higher rates of epilepsy, psychiatric comorbidity, metabolic conditions, and preventable hospitalisations than the general population. They are also, frequently, patients whose health histories are poorly documented, whose communication needs differ from the assumed clinical template, and who are under-served by standard consultation structures.

GPs who feel uncomfortable in these consultations are not lazy or indifferent. They are operating at the edge of preparation they were not given. That is a medical education problem and a vocational training problem — and fixing it requires intervention at the curriculum and college level, not at the level of individual clinician motivation.

The NDIS design problem

The NDIS launched in 2013 and has been operating at full national rollout since 2020. In that time, the NDIS has become a central feature of how Australians with disability access support — and GPs have become critical nodes in the system’s administration, providing the clinical documentation that supports NDIS applications, plan reviews, functional assessments, and specialist referrals.

This was not the result of a deliberate policy design that integrated GPs. It is the result of a system that created a documentation requirement and then assigned it, by default, to whoever had a therapeutic relationship with the patient. GPs were not consulted during the NDIS design process about what that documentation burden would look like in practice, what clinical information was actually needed, or how to structure assessments efficiently.

The consequence is that GPs are spending time in consultations — often complex, time-consuming consultations — completing paperwork for a system they were not trained to navigate and did not help design. Current Medicare item numbers do not adequately reflect the complexity of disability-related consultations. Longer, more complex assessments attract no specific billing support, creating a financial disincentive for GPs to invest time in developing disability care expertise.

What needs to change

The policy recommendations from Dr Luks are concrete: intellectual disability medicine should be included in core medical specialty training curricula; a coordinated, college-led workforce upskilling programme should be established; and GPs should be given the opportunity to review and comment on draft NDIS plans, integrating their clinical knowledge into the planning process rather than being asked only to document it after the fact.

None of these are quick fixes. But the foundation — naming the gap clearly and in numbers — is now in place. Sixty per cent discomfort is a headline figure that a training curriculum can respond to in ways that individual clinical discomfort cannot.

2 cents

The uncomfortable truth in this data is that patients with disability are navigating a health system where the majority of GPs feel underprepared for their care — and those patients are often the ones who most need confident, knowledgeable clinical support. They carry higher disease burden, take more medications, require more complex coordination, and are more likely to have communication needs that standard consultation structures were not designed for.

They are also, frequently, patients who have spent years being dismissed, under-investigated, or bounced between services that could not agree on who was responsible for their care. A GP who can sit with confidence in those consultations — who knows the relevant health conditions, can navigate NDIS requirements, and can provide genuine continuity — is a significant resource for someone in that situation.

That GP exists in 8 per cent of current practices, according to this poll. The training gap that produces that number is a problem the colleges and the curriculum can fix.

Verdict: yes — worth knowing about.

Sources cited

RACGP newsGP — Poll reveals GPs want more disability care support. 26 June 2026. https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/poll-shows-gps-want-more-disability-care-support
NDIS — What is the NDIS? https://www.ndis.gov.au/understanding/what-ndis
AIHW — People with disability in Australia. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/disability/people-with-disability-in-australia