Incentive pay for GPs
The possibility that health care quality could improve if doctors were paid incentive payments will be examined as part of the new round of funding from the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute (APHCRI), based at Australian National University.
Professor Anthony Scott and his team from University of Melbourne hope to determine the right balance between pay-for-performance and quality improvement, which has rapidly increased the income of GPs in the UK but at great cost to government.
Australia already has a system of pay-for-performance in its Practice Incentive Payments scheme – one-off payments to practices when certain services are offered to patients – but is yet to embrace a system like that in the UK.
