Specialists should be allowed to extend the expiry date on formal referrals from GPs when they consider the patient requires their on-going care, a leading healthcare thinktank says.

Canberra’s Deeble Institute claims that of the 15 million referrals written by GPs each year, at least one third are repeats needed purely because a previous referral had expired.

This ‘paperwork’ was usually being driven by demands from non-GP specialists for new referrals so they could claim initial consult MBS items which attract higher rebates.

According to the institute, referral requirements under Medicare have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s and are failing to address the rise of chronic illnesses and multimorbidity where patients require long-term specialist care.