Medical service stirs row

“UNQUALIFIED” trainee and junior doctors are being used as the frontline of an after-hours GP home visits service owned by private equity firms that is costing taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars every year.

A special investigation has found high-end private equity firm Crescent Capital is making millions solely from Medicare funds. The Bulletin can also reveal:

Two people running the peak body that supervises and sets the standards for the industry, Dr Spiro Doukakis and Dr Umberto Russo, have personal investments in the sector’s biggest service provider, National Home Doctor Service;

Unpublished Medicare data shows 70 per cent of the 1.86 million after-hours house calls in 2015-16 were made by nonvocationally registered GPs and GP trainees; and

The program is riddled with visits from trainee doctors that have allegedly led to misdiagnosis, complications and poor quality of care.

There have been serious breaches in healthcare and GPs across the country are also raising issues about having to clean up the mess left by the untrained after-hours doctors.

Royal Australian College of GPs president Dr Bastian Seidel said many of the visits were not urgent and should attract a fee of $74 instead of $130.

He said doctors who were “not qualified” were doing home visits and were “in and out in under five minutes”.

In June the Medicare Benefits Schedule Review Taskforce determined patients were getting “unnecessary and inappropriate care”.

A spokesman for Health Minister Greg Hunt said the Minister was “deeply concerned” about the reports.