Where clinical documentation time goes in Australia

The RACGP surveyed 2,416 practising GPs in April and May 2025. Dissatisfaction with the amount of administration attached to their work has risen in every survey since 2022: 58% in 2022, 60% in 2023, 70% in 2024, and 77% in 2025 (Health of the Nation 2025, figure 43).

The tasks GPs nominated, in order (figure 44):

• Authority scripts, 44%.
• Clinical administration, 36%.
• Government and insurance assessments, including Centrelink and WorkCover, 30%.
• Referrals, 28%.
• Correspondence 15%, results 15%, National Disability Insurance Scheme work 15%.
• Medicare processes 11%, paperwork 11%, technology 9%, certificates 6%, patients 3%.

Wave 5 of the Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life survey asked 2,200 GPs, 3,455 specialists, 1,270 specialists in training and 1,656 hospital non-specialists how their working week divided. Doctors reported an average of just under seven hours a week, 16% of working time, on non-clinical activity (Joyce, Eyre, Wang and Laurence, Australian Health Review 39(5), 588 to 594).

Specialists were more likely than GPs to report long non-clinical hours, and hospital non-specialists reported relatively high management and administration hours. That wave was collected in 2012.

Any practitioner who provides or initiates a service for which a Medicare benefit is payable should maintain adequate and contemporaneous records, and the standards for that are prescribed in the Health Insurance (Professional Services Review Scheme) Regulations 2019. To be adequate, the record must identify the patient, carry a separate dated entry for each attendance, give clinical information sufficient to explain the service, and be comprehensible enough that another practitioner relying on it can undertake the patient's ongoing care. To be contemporaneous, it should be completed at the time the service was rendered or as soon as practicable afterwards (MBS note GN.15.39).

Since 1 November 1999, Professional Services Review committees determining questions of inappropriate practice have been obliged to consider whether the practitioner kept adequate and contemporaneous records.

Section 8.4.1 of the Medical Board of Australia's Good medical practice requires accurate, up-to-date and legible records covering clinical history, clinical findings, investigations, information given to the patient, medication and other management, in a form other health practitioners can understand.

The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) classes health information as sensitive information, which the Australian Privacy Principles hold to tighter collection, use and disclosure rules than ordinary personal information.

Clinical administration, referrals and correspondence are drafted from the consult, leaving review and correction.

Authority scripts are a prescribing approval process drafting does not reach. Government and insurance assessments and National Disability Insurance Scheme work are third-party forms completed from the record.

Results sit partly outside the drafting step. Signed letters go out over Medical Objects. Integrations.

Medicare processes are a separate step. Billing items are captured at the bedside against the episode, for your practice to claim. Billing.

The survey measures dissatisfaction rather than minutes.