Australian GP practices lose most new patient enquiries at the booking step, not the awareness step – in unanswered phone calls and abandoned online bookings rather than in a shortage of people trying to find them. This matters commercially because fixing the booking step costs nothing in advertising, which is the relevant consideration when Medicare rebates and wage costs have already compressed the margin. This article sets out where the losses occur, how to measure them, and what AHPRA permits you to say.
GP practices lose patients at the booking step because the decision window is extremely short. A prospective patient who has just moved into the area will search for a practice, look at three, and call one. Whether they become a patient of that practice for the next decade is decided in roughly ninety seconds – by whether the call is answered, whether the online booking system shows a usable appointment, and whether the person on the phone sounds like they have time.
Practices rarely measure any of this. Two questions expose it immediately: what was the abandoned-call rate at 8:30am last Monday, and how many online booking sessions were started but not completed last month? In most clinics those two numbers exceed the entire new patient intake, and neither costs a cent in advertising to address.
A GP practice improves its answer rate through structural change rather than staff effort. Reception is already triaging in-person patients, phones, results and scripts simultaneously, so expecting a higher answer rate through effort alone is unrealistic. The workable options are to shift new patient enquiries to a separate number with its own handling, to use overflow or callback rather than an engaged tone, and to move routine bookings online so the phone is freed for conversations that genuinely need a person.
An online booking system deters patients when it shows no availability, or when appointment types are written in language only staff can interpret. A booking screen showing nothing for eleven days is not a booking system, it is a deterrent. If the books are genuinely that full, say so explicitly and offer a waitlist or callback – a clear message keeps the patient in your orbit, whereas an empty calendar sends them back to search again.
A Google Business Profile matters because for a local health service it does more work than the website. Opening hours, whether the practice is accepting new patients, which doctors are on, parking, telehealth availability and the phone number are all consulted before anyone clicks through to the site.
The failure mode is drift. Hours change over winter, a doctor leaves, the practice adds a service, and the profile stays as it was three years ago. A prospective patient who arrives to a closed door does not call to clarify – they go elsewhere and do not come back. Assign the profile to one named person and review it monthly. This is unglamorous work with a direct commercial return, and it sits at the foundation of the broader search optimisation that brings new patients to a practice in the first place.
Yes – GP recruitment is an employer-brand problem, and in most multi-GP practices it is a harder constraint than patient volume. A registrar or experienced GP evaluates a clinic exactly the way a patient does: they look it up.
What they usually find is a website written entirely for patients, with a careers page that says “email your CV”. Meanwhile they are trying to establish billing mix, patient load, nursing support, teaching culture, and whether the principal is difficult to work with. A practice that answers those questions openly has an advantage over one that leaves them to be inferred from silence. Treating the clinic’s public presence as an employer brand, not only a patient brand, is one of the higher-leverage uses of content marketing available to a practice owner.
Paid advertising is worthwhile for a GP practice when there is defined demand and spare capacity to absorb it – a new practice opening, a new location, or a service line with clear demand such as skin checks or travel health. It is efficient because it meets someone at the moment they are searching.
It works poorly as a substitute for capacity. If the constraint is that the practice has no appointments, buying more enquiries converts spend into frustration and poor reviews. Confirm the practice can absorb the volume before committing budget. Where the numbers do support it, search advertising can be tightly geo-fenced to the genuine catchment, which keeps waste low on a thin margin.
Yes. Billing is the most searched and least clearly answered question about any Australian general practice. Mixed billing is frequently explained in a single ambiguous line, or not at all, producing two bad outcomes: patients who arrive expecting bulk billing and are upset at the desk, and patients who assume the practice is expensive and never call.
Publishing the arrangement plainly – who is bulk billed, what a standard consultation costs, what concession arrangements apply — reduces friction at reception and pre-qualifies enquiries. It is also the most effective protection against reputational backlash following a billing change, because the change lands as information rather than a surprise.
Four numbers, reviewed monthly, are enough for most practices. Three of the four come from systems the practice already pays for.
Watching these move is what turns marketing from an act of faith into a managed cost, which matters when every dollar is being scrutinised.
Advertising a regulated health service in Australia is governed by the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, which prohibits advertising that is false or misleading, uses testimonials about clinical care, creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment, or encourages the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of health services. AHPRA publishes guidelines for advertising a regulated health service explaining how it applies these requirements. The restrictions concern claims and testimonials, not factual information about your services, your doctors’ qualifications, your opening hours, or your fees.
This requires care. Reviews commenting on clinical care are testimonials for the purposes of the National Law, and the restriction applies to material a practice uses in advertising. Practices generally cannot control what a patient writes on an independent platform, but they should not solicit, incentivise or republish clinical testimonials. Seek advice specific to your circumstances before running any review campaign.
Practice managers are usually well placed to own it, because they have the clearest view of capacity, billing, and where enquiries are being lost. What matters is that they have a defined budget, decision-making authority, and a small number of agreed metrics. Marketing tends to stall when it is an additional duty with no mandate rather than an owned function.
Start with the interventions that cost nothing — conversion and profile accuracy rather than advertising — and measure the change. A practice that lifts its answered-call rate and completes its Google Business Profile usually sees movement in new registrations before spending anything on media. That result then becomes the evidence base for deciding whether paid activity is warranted.
Growth in Australian general practice is rarely about being louder. It is about making sure the people already trying to reach you can get through, and being clear enough about how the practice works that the right patients and the right doctors both self-select toward you. If you would like to talk through where your practice is losing enquiries, we are happy to have that conversation.