If you send someone here, you are lending them your judgement.

What a referral looks like

There is no form. A phone call works, a note works, and a patient ringing us themselves and saying you sent them works. If you have a referral letter already written, send it and we will not start from nothing, but chasing paperwork is not going to be the reason somebody does not get seen.

Consulting days are Monday, Thursday and Friday. Every patient has a free nurse call before the doctor, so if you are sending somebody with a complicated medication list that call is where it gets sorted out.

What it costs your patient

Nothing. Not a discount they have to apply for, not a rebate that arrives later. The nurse call is free and the consult is free, so you never have to make a private judgement about whether the person in front of you can afford to be sent somewhere.

If a medicine is prescribed, they pay the pharmacy for the medicine and they are told what it costs before anything is written. We do not mark it up and we do not take a clip of it.

What comes back to you

• A written note after every consult, not just the first: what was assessed, what was decided, and the reasoning if the answer was no.
• Only with the patient’s say-so. If they would rather nothing came back to a local service, nothing does, and you should know that up front rather than wonder later why you heard nothing.
• A route to a person. If something is not working, or your patient tells you something that worries you, you ring (08) 8004 2420 and speak to somebody, not a ticket queue.

How it is governed, and what is still unfinished

Bugalwah is Aboriginal-controlled, and the service is being designed with community rather than presented to it finished. That is the answer to the question most health workers ask first, and it is checkable: ask who is on the board and who the clinical lead answers to.

What is not finished, said plainly so you hear it from us rather than from a patient: practitioner names and Ahpra registration numbers are not published on the site yet, and the visual design beyond the emblem is placeholder rather than commissioned work. Neither affects the clinical service, and both are being fixed.

The barrier we are least able to solve on our own is the entirely reasonable expectation of being judged by a health system. A free consultation and a video link do not touch it. It comes down to who answers the phone and how they talk, and you are far better placed than we are to tell us whether we are actually any good at it.

For pharmacists

Prescribing produces a genuine eRx token into your dispensing software, not a PDF or a portal login, so the dispense and the S8 register entry work the way they normally do. Repeats sit with you, the patient comes back to your counter, and the clinic takes no margin on the medicine.

Getting in touch

Ring (08) 8004 2420 or email hello@bugalwah.clinic. If you would rather see how we talk to patients before you send one, the homepage and the questions page are exactly what they read.