East Bentleigh Medical Group has made the difficult decision to stop universally bulk billing all children.

Recently we have been forced to review our general billing practices in the face of an obvious financial imbalance between takings and expenses.   There are many reasons for this imbalance, but they have existed for some time. Having delayed this action many times before, our doctors simply cannot continue to bulk bill all children indefinitely.

Management (who are also doctors here) supports measures which enable the clinic to continue to provide care including supporting the doctors’ personal decisions regarding their billing practices.

Your doctor decides your billing and you can discuss this as part of your consultation.

For consistency and transparency EBMG will encourage the private billing of all children over 5 (but at a reduced rate compared with the adult private billing rate) except those whose family have a commonwealth Health Care Card or other pension entitlement.

There will continue to be no out of pocket charges for the practice of administration of vaccines by the nurses.

We will continue to encourage bulk billing of consultations for children 5 and younger but some doctors may choose to charge privately.

Most of the EBMG doctors bulk bill consultations for pensioners and HCC holders and this situation is still in place.

Thank you