MBS Review shoots down bid for nurse practitioners to bill care plans

The MBS Review Taskforce has rejected a proposal from one of its committees to let nurse practitioners bill Medicare for care plans and after-hours home visits.
Instead, it has written three of its own recommendations to address “foundational issues”, including what it calls a lack of clarity on nurse practitioners’ scope of practice.
The original report from the Nurse Practitioner Reference Group was published in 2019 and pushed for increases in funding and a dramatically expanded role for the profession.
The committee consisted of nine nurses, two patient representatives and only two GPs, one of whom later asked for his name to be removed from its report because he had only attended a single meeting.