The Medicare phone line will no longer be open 24 hours a day as part of customer service restructuring in 2025.
The change, which will begin from January 2, will mean Australians will only be able to call Medicare from 7am to 10pm Monday to Friday and 7am to 7pm on weekends.
This follows an internal Services Australia review that found just one per cent of all calls received to Medicare occurred 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 24-hour hotlines.
“We regularly evaluate our business practices to ensure we provide our services efficiently and effectively,” the spokesperson said.
They attributed the change to the introduction of Medicare’s online claims tracker, which has “helped reduce telephone inquiries.”
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 that unanswered calls to Centrelink almost doubled in the year to March 31, 2024, to more than 11 million.
Medicare phone lines will no longer be available 24/7 and will now be limited to 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends starting March 2 January (archive image)
The change comes after an internal review by Services Australia found less than one per cent of calls came from outside the new hours (file image)
Services Australia data figures revealed 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 automatic recordings that inform people waiting in the telephone queue that staff are too busy to answer them.
Those who try to reach a person are directed to online services and then the call is abruptly disconnected.
Nearly two million of those missed calls were to the disability, illness and caregiver line, and those who managed to get through still had to wait an average of 47 minutes.
And those huge figures don’t even include unanswered calls from Medicare and Centrelink aged care customers, who were hung up on more than a million times.
That figure represented a disturbing 27,500 percent increase over the previous year’s figure, when only 4,067 people were hanged.
Thousands of additional staff have been recruited to work with Centrelink, who had been trained to take calls and process claims in April in response to the damning figures.
Services Australia CEO Hank Jongen said “congestion message usage has halved since January” and wait times have been reduced.