The patients who need daytime GP home visits in Australia — and why no one is serving them

This guide is written for GPs considering home visiting work through C.A.L.L.S. It answers the most important question before the earnings and logistics questions: is there genuine patient demand for a daytime home visit service? The answer is documented, large, and growing — and the national service to meet it does not yet exist. Sources at the end.

The scale of unmet demand

Australia's GP industry generates $29.1 billion in revenue in 2026 (IBISWorld). Australians average 6.1 GP visits per person per year. More than 8 in 10 Australians had at least one Medicare-subsidised GP visit in 2024-25 (AIHW). Despite this, 27% of the 18.5 million Australians who needed GP care in 2024-25 delayed or did not access it — and 7 in 10 of those cited barriers other than cost (AIHW).

The barriers most cited — long wait times, difficulty getting to the service, distance — are not clinical problems. They are access problems. A daytime GP home visit removes every one of them. The patient receives care in their home at a time that suits them, from a doctor who has come to them rather than requiring them to navigate a system that was not designed with their access needs in mind.

Older Australians — the primary patient cohort

AIHW data on older Australians shows that most (95%) older Australians see a GP. In 2019-20 there were 43 million Medicare claims for unreferred GP attendances for people aged 65 and over — 30% of all unreferred GP attendance claims nationally. Older Australians see GPs significantly more often than younger Australians, and their clinical needs are often more complex, more chronic, and more reliant on continuity of care with a specific GP they know and trust.

Research published in 2026 by Flinders University's ROSA Research Centre, analysing health outcomes for more than 120,000 Australians aged 65 and over receiving home care, found that patients who continued seeing their usual GP had an 18 to 28 per cent lower risk of going to an emergency department or hospital compared with those who frequently saw new doctors. Continuity of GP care for older people is not a comfort factor — it is a measurable clinical outcome. A home visiting GP who builds relationships with elderly patients over time is delivering care that demonstrably reduces hospitalisation.

Yet getting an elderly patient to a clinic during business hours is genuinely difficult for a significant proportion of this cohort. Transport dependency, mobility limitations, fatigue from chronic illness, and the logistical complexity of arranging a clinic visit for a frail person are real barriers — not preferences. The daytime home visit model is the obvious clinical solution for this group.

Chronic disease — 15 million Australians with ongoing primary care needs

According to the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 1 in 2 Australians has at least one chronic condition. That is approximately 15 million people. In 2022-23, $82 billion was spent on treating chronic diseases in Australia. AIHW's 2024 chronic conditions analysis notes that the use of Medicare-subsidised GP services per person is increasing, driven in part by the ongoing management needs of this chronic disease cohort.

Patients with chronic conditions see their GP significantly more often than the general population — and the access barriers they face are often compounded by the very conditions that make regular monitoring necessary. A patient managing COPD, heart failure, or advanced diabetes has clinical reasons to see their GP regularly, physical reasons that make clinic attendance difficult, and clinical reasons why continuity with a known GP matters for their outcomes. Daytime home visiting directly addresses all three.

Post-surgical recovery and the discharge gap

Hospital discharge planning in Australia has improved significantly, but the gap between hospital discharge and stable community GP care remains a genuine risk period for many patients. Post-surgical patients discharged home are often not mobile enough to attend a clinic for follow-up, not stable enough to leave unmonitored, and not well enough served by telehealth alone when physical assessment is needed. A daytime home visit in the days or weeks following discharge provides the clinical oversight that reduces readmission risk — without requiring the patient to return to a hospital or navigate a clinic visit they are not yet physically capable of managing comfortably.

No national daytime service — the competitive reality

After-hours GP home visit services in Australia — 13SICK, Hello Home Doctor, DoctorDoctor, 13CURE, and OnCallDrs — all operate specifically outside standard business hours. Their business model depends on Medicare's higher after-hours rebates, which do not apply during standard hours (weekdays 8am–6pm and Saturdays 8am–noon). Perth Home GP is the only service operating at scale as a daytime private home visit practice in Australia — and it is Perth only.

Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide have no equivalent national daytime home visit service. The patient cohort described in this guide — elderly, chronically ill, post-surgical, mobility-impaired — exists in every Australian city. The demand is documented and growing as Australia's population ages. The supply is, nationally, almost zero.

A GP who joins C.A.L.L.S now is not entering a crowded market. They are entering the first national platform to address a gap that existing services have structurally chosen not to fill — and building a patient base in a demographic that grows with every passing year.