What is the General Practice in Aged Care Incentive?

It is the Medicare incentive payment for GPs providing regular care to patients in residential aged care facilities. The current rate is $300 per patient per year to the GP and $130 to the practice. The RACGP describes this as inadequate relative to the time and administrative burden involved, particularly given that aged care patients typically have multiple complex conditions, are on five or more medications, and require coordination with nursing staff, allied health, and families.

Why does GP presence in aged care matter for patients and families?

NSW data shows that aged care residents experience seven times more ambulance episodes and six times more unplanned hospital admissions than the general community. Regular GP involvement — medication reviews, early identification of deterioration, advance care planning — prevents many of those presentations. For residents who are frail and disoriented by hospital environments, avoiding unnecessary emergency transfers is clinically meaningful, not just administratively convenient.

RACGP: The GP aged care incentive pays $300 a year. The job costs far more.

What just happened

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has released a position statement on general practice in aged care, identifying what it describes as “significant barriers” to GPs providing sustainable care in residential aged care homes — and proposing 20 recommendations to address them.

The document names three core problems: inadequate funding structures, workforce pipeline failures, and gaps in culturally safe care for vulnerable older populations. The RACGP position statement is not an abstract policy wish-list — it arrives in the context of an aged care system that is visibly struggling to ensure medical oversight of some of the most complex patients in the health system.

The core funding problem is straightforward to state, if politically difficult to fix. The General Practice in Aged Care Incentive currently provides $300 annually per patient to the GP and $130 to the practice. That $300 is meant to cover what is actually a clinically demanding, administratively intensive service for patients who are typically frail, multiply-medicated, and require coordination across nursing staff, allied health, and families. Travel time, family communication, staff liaison, prescription management, and the associated documentation are absorbed by practices as operational losses. The funding rate does not account for any of that.

Both-and

The hospital numbers make the case

Before engaging with the policy debate, it’s worth sitting with the hospital utilisation data. NSW data shows aged care residents experience seven times higher ambulance episodes and six times more unplanned hospital admissions compared to the general community, based on data from 2016 to 2021.

Those numbers are not inherent to frailty. They reflect what happens when regular medical oversight is absent — or inadequate — for a population with high rates of infection, falls, medication events, and acute-on-chronic deterioration. A GP who visits regularly, reviews medications, identifies early deterioration, and has an established relationship with nursing staff prevents a substantial proportion of those calls. A facility without that relationship sees ambulances.

The Illawarra-Shoalhaven Aged Care Outreach Service, which embedded clinical teams into residential facilities to provide on-site treatment including intravenous antibiotics and fluid administration, reported more than 95 per cent of residents referred were able to avoid a trip to emergency — 2,393 out of 2,502 referrals in the 2025–26 financial year. That is not a marginal result. It is a proof of concept for what sustained clinical presence in aged care produces: it keeps frail people out of emergency departments that are ill-suited to their needs.

The funding-reality mismatch

RACGP president Dr Michael Wright was direct: “the incentive is very complicated and puts a lot of administrative burden on practices.” The complexity of claiming the incentive adds hours of administrative work to the actual clinical work — a double barrier.

Nearly two-thirds of Australians over 75 take five or more medications daily. Medication review in this population is not a minor task — it requires clinical time, engagement with dispensing pharmacists, communication with specialists who prescribed the original regimens, and documentation. The $300 annual incentive does not create a sustainable business case for a practice to allocate that time. The result is predictable: GPs who would provide excellent aged care withdraw because the practice economics don’t support it, facilities become dependent on a smaller number of committed practitioners who absorb the losses, and the model is fragile.

The workforce pipeline problem

The RACGP position statement also names the training pipeline. GPs are significantly underrepresented in prevocational (intern and residency) training placements in aged care settings, meaning that junior doctors who might develop interest and competence in aged care medicine rarely encounter it during formative training years. The specialties that manage aged care patients at hospital level — geriatrics, palliative care — have established training pathways. General practice in aged care settings does not have the same visibility as a training destination.

This is a longer-cycle problem than funding reform. Building a workforce pipeline for aged care general practice requires embedding GP registrars in residential aged care placements, ensuring those placements are funded and supervised, and making the career path visible to junior doctors before they’ve already committed to other directions. The RACGP position argues for expanded prevocational training in aged care as part of the solution — the policy reform and the training reform need to move together.

The cultural safety dimension

The position statement also addresses gaps in culturally safe care for older Australians from First Nations backgrounds and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. These populations are often underrepresented in residential aged care relative to their needs, and when they are present, the facility capacity to deliver culturally appropriate care — including in end-of-life contexts — is variable. This is a dimension of the aged care workforce problem that sits alongside, but is distinct from, the funding question.

The NDIS exclusion

The RACGP also criticises the exclusion of GPs from National Disability Insurance Scheme assessments, arguing it makes health and disability navigation unnecessarily complex for ageing Australians who sit at the intersection of aged care and disability. This is a coordination problem that affects patients and GPs navigating two systems that don’t talk to each other well.

My two cents

For GPs currently providing aged care: the RACGP position statement is a formal articulation of what most already know from practice. The funding does not cover the job. That is not a subtle inefficiency — it is a structural mismatch that is actively driving practitioners away from a patient population with significant unmet need.

For patients and families: the connection between GP presence in residential aged care and reduced hospital presentations is real and documented. If a family member is in aged care and experiencing repeated emergency transfers that seem preventable, it is worth asking what level of regular medical review is occurring and whether that can be increased.

The RACGP’s 20 recommendations represent a comprehensive reform agenda. Whether government moves on any of them in the near term is a different question. But the position statement establishes the clinical evidence base for why the current funding model is failing — and makes clear that the hospital cost of underinvesting in aged care general practice is not a saving.

Verdict: yes — the RACGP has formally quantified the funding-reality gap in aged care general practice, and the hospital utilisation data makes the cost of that gap concrete.

Sources cited

‘Significant barriers’ to GP aged care. Medical Republic, 25 August 2026. https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/significant-barriers-to-gp-aged-care/128452
Specialist care replaces hospital trips for Illawarra aged care residents. ABC News, 26 August 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-26/aged-care-outreach-service-illawarra-shoalhaven-hospital/107039862