I ended up in a Medicare urgent care clinic … and I liked it

July 17, 2026 — 7:48am

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It wasn’t the sharp twist of my ankle or the sudden tripping sensation that spooked me: those feelings I’m quite familiar with as someone with (what my physio has since told me is) a hypermobile ankle. It was the seconds after my ankle gave way — time I usually spend snapping back and continuing on my run — that told me I was in trouble.

Hobbling along the home stretch of a 16 kilometre training run, just 300 metres from home, I could feel the probability of a marathon personal best dwindling with every step: this stabbing pain felt worse than any of my previous misadventures.

Even once I’d lain down with my ankle elevated and iced, I could feel the joint angrily protesting in pain. I have a bad habit of letting my mind rule over my body and pushing through the warning signs. I couldn’t get anywhere without someone holding me up.

All of this is to say: I ended up at a Medicare urgent care clinic in the Perth suburb of Booragoon the next day. It’s where I saw how the billions of dollars in public spending on a new form of healthcare could meet a need almost all of us have occasionally – at a surprisingly smaller cost to patients and taxpayers.

I wasn’t particularly keen to pay for an appointment with a general practitioner after copping a hefty fee to push back my flight home to Sydney. Finding a bulk-billed GP was also tricky: most seemed not to offer the service, and the ones that did only offered it to certain people or were heavily booked. I also knew I would almost certainly be sent elsewhere — and be billed again — for an X-ray.

The emergency department would be a one-stop to rule out a fracture or anything more serious than a sprain. But I knew I’d be (rightly) triaged as a low-priority case and be waiting indefinitely — and that it just wasn’t the right place to be for a non-life-threatening condition.

A quick search told me that a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic would be the best fit for me, treating “minor fractures, sprains and sports injuries” — as well as other non-life-threatening but urgent cases such as minor........

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