Preventive health care is often overlooked in the hustle of daily life. Imagine catching health issues before they become serious problems, avoiding hospital visits, and maintaining your independence well into old age. A proactive approach that helps you stay one step ahead of illness and live your best life.
Here’s something we’ve come to understand after years in this work: most of what we do is reactive. Someone comes in with a problem—a cough that won’t shift, a knee that’s playing up, a rash that’s worrying them. We help sort it out. That’s good medicine. It’s important work, and it genuinely helps people get through their days.
But we also know this: the things that will make the biggest difference to your health over the course of your life probably aren’t going to be how brilliantly we manage your acute illnesses. They’re going to be all those small, incremental changes that prevent the big problems from arriving in the first place.
You might remember that productivity matrix, the one that divides tasks into urgent and important quadrants. The magic happens in the “not urgent but important” square. Those are the things that actually alter the course of your life. Health works exactly the same way.
Challenges of Reactive Healthcare
In the normal run of medical consultations, we’re necessarily focusing on whatever brought you through the door that day. It’s not an ideal setting for expansive preventive healthcare. We do everything we can to weave prevention into every consultation, but there’s a practical limit. When someone needs help with something acute, that takes priority. It has to.
This isn’t the best system for systematically identifying preventive healthcare opportunities. Which is why we need to carve out dedicated time for it.
Exploring Health Assessments: Medicare Eligibility and Benefits
Medicare subsidises several comprehensive health assessments, though some are more utilised than others. Many people simply don’t know they exist.
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Assessment: Any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is eligible for this once per year. It’s a meaningful initiative trying to target some of the persistent gaps in health outcomes in Australia.
- Over 75 Health Assessment: Anyone over 75 can access this annually. There’s particular focus here on maintaining independence and quality of life, preventing falls, and increasingly, dementia prevention. We even help identify other services you might benefit from because navigating the home and aged care system is not easy.
- 45-49 Health Assessment: Here’s one that catches people off guard, if you’re between 45 and 49, you’re eligible for a one-off health assessment. This age represents a genuine transition. It’s when people become substantially higher risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other conditions that benefit enormously from early intervention.
Understanding the Comprehensive Preventive Health Assessment Process
At our practice, these assessments are largely nurse-driven, which gives us the space to be systematic. We go through all the evidence-based determinants of health that we might be able to modify together.
That includes screening and case-finding for cancer prevention and lowering cardiovascular risk. It covers keeping vaccinations current and discussing what might be recommended for your particular circumstances. We explore family history including what patterns we might need to watch for?
But it’s also about the lifestyle factors that are critical determinants of health and often fall by the wayside in a typical consultation focused on an acute issue. Diet, movement, sleep, stress, social connection are the things we all know matter but rarely get dedicated attention.
Our passion shows up as partnership, too. Partnership with you, because you know your own life best. And with each other, because great healthcare isn’t a solo act.
The Preventive Health Paradox: Why Staying Well Requires Proactive Care
Here’s the tricky bit; it’s sometimes hard to get people in for a health assessment when they feel they’re in good health. Even though that’s actually the best time to do it. We get it! When you feel fine, dedicating an hour to health feels unnecessary, maybe even a bit indulgent.
But that’s precisely the point. We’re trying to keep you feeling fine. We’re looking for the small things we can address now before they become the big things that bring you in urgently later.
Easy Access to Health Assessments
We recognise how important this preventive work is. That’s why we bulk bill these comprehensive assessments, even though we’re otherwise a private billing practice. We don’t want cost to be the barrier between you and the kind of care that actually changes outcomes over time.
The process itself is straightforward: you’ll see one of our nurses who’ll work through the assessment systematically, then you’ll see a doctor to help make sense of what we’ve found and what it means for you specifically.
Not Eligible? Still Book a Health Care Assessment
Even if you’re not in one of the groups eligible for a Medicare-subsidised assessment, we’d encourage you to book in for a health check anyway. This isn’t about ticking boxes or meeting quotas. It’s about making sure we’re doing everything we can to keep you living your life to the fullest.
The urgent things will always get attention because that’s how the system works, and rightly so. But let’s not let the important things slip through the cracks while we’re busy putting out fires.
Sometimes the most powerful medicine is the kind that prevents you from needing medicine at all. Preventive health care aims to catch potential health issues early, addressing risk factors like poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and high blood pressure before they develop into serious conditions.
