Australia is on track for a shortfall of nearly 9,000 full-time GPs by 2048, according to the government’s own workforce modelling. More GPs are retiring than entering the profession, and the ones who stay are working fewer hours on average, even as demand keeps climbing with an ageing population.
It’s easy to read that as a workforce problem for governments and training bodies to solve. For a practice owner, though, it’s also an operational fact that changes how the next two decades need to be planned because the number of GP hours available per patient isn’t going up. It’s going down.
The government’s own modelling puts the shortfall at roughly 5,560 full-time-equivalent GPs by 2033, growing to around 8,900 by 2048. Average FTE per GP is also projected to decline, from about 0.74 to 0.72, meaning even the GPs who stay in the workforce are, on average, working somewhat fewer hours than GPs have historically.
Put together, the picture is straightforward: fewer GPs, working slightly fewer hours each, trying to meet demand from a population that’s both growing and ageing. None of these trends reverse on their own within the next two decades.
When GP hours were more abundant relative to demand, a practice had more room to absorb inefficiency, a slot that went to the wrong patient, a no-show that wasn’t followed up, a chronic disease review that ran a few months late. There was more slack in the system to make up for it later.
A tightening GP supply removes that slack. Every consultation hour becomes a scarcer resource, which means the cost of using it inefficiently rises. A slot spent on a patient who didn’t strictly need to be seen that week is a slot that wasn’t available for a patient whose need was more pressing and with fewer GP hours overall, there’s less room to simply add more capacity to compensate.
This isn’t a call to see more patients per hour, or to shorten consultations. It’s about making sure the consultations that do happen are going to the right patients at the right time, which is a question of process, not clinical effort.
In practice, that means three things become more valuable as GP supply tightens:
Making sure overdue and high-risk patients are actually identified and contacted, rather than waiting for them to book on their own initiative. Reducing the number of appointment slots lost to patients who were never reached in the first place, not just formal no-shows. And prioritising outreach by clinical significance, so the patients who most need a slot are the ones a clinic is actively working to bring in.
The workforce shortfall is a multi-decade, sector-wide problem that no single practice can solve on its own. But the way a practice uses the GP hours it does have is very much within its control and as the ratio of GPs to patients continues to tighten, that becomes one of the highest-leverage things a practice owner can get right.
Coda is built around exactly this shift: rather than relying on patients to remember and rebook on their own, it identifies overdue and high-risk patients directly from Best Practice data and reaches out to them proactively, with follow-up for anyone who doesn’t respond. As GP capacity gets scarcer over the coming years, making sure that capacity reaches the right patients first stops being a nice-to-have and starts being one of the more consequential decisions a practice makes.
See how Coda helps clinics get more from the GP hours they already have.
The infrastructure layer that turns GP clinics from passive waiters into active carers.
© 2026 Coda Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.
Made in Australia.
