Medicare’s telephone line will no longer be open around the clock as part of customer service shake-up in 2025.
The change, commencing from January 2, will mean Aussies can only call Medicare from 7am-10pm on weekdays and 7am-7pm on weekends.
It follows an internal review from Services Australia which found only one per cent of all calls received to Medicare came outside of those hours.
A Services Australia spokesperson said the change will help ‘reallocate staff to priority Medicare work’ such as processing claims or calls on other emergency 24-hour lines.
‘We regularly evaluate our business practices to make sure we’re delivering our services efficiently and effectively,’ the spokesperson said.
They credited the change to the introduction of Medicare’s online claims tracker which has ‘helped reduce phone enquiries’.
The online service, which will remain accessible 24/7, has been used ‘more than 1.8 million times in an average of 12 seconds per check’.
It comes just months after it was revealed the unanswered calls to Centrelink almost doubled in the year to March 31, 2024, to more than 11million.
Phone lines to Medicare will no longer be available 24/7 and will now instead be limited to 7am-10pm on weekdays and 7am-7pm on weekends from January 2 (stock image)
The change follows an internal review by Services Australia which found that less than one per cent of calls came from outside the new hours (stock image)
The figures from Services Australia data unveiled in July revealed there had been 11,268,048 congestion messages, up from 6,997,300 in the previous 12-month period.
Congestion messages are the automated recordings that tell people on hold in the phone queue that staff are too busy to answer them.
Those trying to get through to a person are referred to online services and then the call abruptly disconnects.
Nearly two million of those dropped calls were to the disabilities, sickness and carers line, and those who did get through still had to wait an average of 47 minutes.
And those huge numbers do not even include unanswered calls for Medicare and Centrelink aged care clients, who were hung up on more than a million times.
That figure was a disturbing 27,500 per cent increase on the previous year’s figure when just 4,067 people were hung up on.
Thousands of extra staff have been hired to work with Centrelink who had been trained to take calls and process claims by April in response to the damning figures.
Services Australia general manager, Hank Jongen claimed the ‘use of congestion messaging has halved since January’ and that wait times are down.
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