Warrnambool GP says budget cash vital but 'won't change things overnight'

Tuesday's federal budget allocated $3.5 billion over five years to triple the amount GPs receive for bulk-billing eligible patients, following an almost decade-long freeze on the rebate that had put GP practices out of business and pushed many doctors out of general practice.

The budget also included $445.1 million for practices to hire "multidisciplinary teams" of allied health workers, $951.2 million to improve digital health infrastructure like My Health Record, and $98.2 million to increase the amount GPs receive for long consultations.

Warrnambool GP Dr Tatiana Cimpoesu said the investment had been a long time coming but it turned the tide after a decade of neglect.

"For the first time in a long, long time a government is doing more than make some promise about the future, so it's definitely a step in the right direction," she said.

Dr Cimpoesu said the higher rebate for consultations that ran beyond an hour was a worthy change.

"We want to take time because we want to deal with the whole person and people are complex. But at the same time if we don't see people we don't get paid," she said.

"It's really been a struggle for us, which is why the private fees kept on creeping up."

Dr Cimpoesu said the freeze on the bulk-billing rebate, which had been in place since 2014, had crippled many clinics and hurt staff and patients alike.

"The rebates were frozen for a long time at $39.75. I have short hair and my haircut still costs more than that, so how am I supposed to cover my annual leave, sick days, my staff expenses and all the rest?" she said.

"Tripling the rebate is going to help with people on pensions and healthcare cards, who have been having to pay recently because otherwise we just couldn't survive."

But she said stopping the decline in bulk-billing wasn't "the be all and end all".

"We're very hung up on this bulk-billing thing, but it's not going to change things overnight. We still need people to come and join the GP workforce," Dr Cimpoesu said.

"The past few years we've had very few young doctors wanting to come into general practice, and you can't blame them. I'm hoping this will change that."

She said like many of her colleagues she was "burnt out", and with two elderly parents she had decided to sell her GP partnership and cut down to working two days a week.

"There are lots of people like me and I know lots of ex-registrars who I trained who are no longer practising or practising very little," Dr Cimpoesu said. "I don't know if they'll come back."

She said she hoped the huge investment was the start of a pivot towards primary healthcare.

"We really don't need to be building more hospitals, we need to put more money into prevention," she said.