Consultations

All Consultations will now be conducted via Telehealth (video or telephone). This ensures that patients can remain safely at home. We are still able to assess most pain conditions and provide comprehensive management advice. Our preference is to use a Video consultation via a platform such as Zoom. However, we are happy to try other platforms or use telephone.

We will continue private billing for these consultations and charge a similar “gap” that patients would have previously paid. For example, the face-to-face Initial consultation charge is $350, with a Medicare Rebate of $132.30, which results in a $217.70 out of pocket gap. Therefore, we are now charging $220 for this (no Medicare rebate will be claimable). Unfortunately, the new bulk-billed COVID-19 Medicare rates are insufficient to cover our costs, so we cannot offer these at this time. There are different arrangements for Rural, DVA, Workers Compensation and Motor Vehicle Accident patients (please ask staff for details).

Interventional Procedures

All non-urgent elective surgery in Australia has been cancelled during the pandemic. That includes our interventional pain management procedures. We have established a waitlist of patients who had procedures booked and will contact you as soon as it is safe to resume these procedures. It is important to understand that many of our patients who experience chronic pain are at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19 due to:

• Often being older with multiple other medical problems

• Chronic pain itself can cause some immunosuppression

• Chronic opioid medications can cause some immunosuppression

• Corticosteroids that are injected during interventional pain procedures can cause some immunosuppression

Therefore, we STRONGLY RECOMMEND AGAINST INTERVENTIONAL PAIN PROCEDURES or STEROID INJECTIONS at this stage. There are a small number of urgent situations which may justify the increased risk. We can carefully evaluate this at our consultation and perform the required procedure if justified. This position is supported by Pain Societies throughout the world.

We will continue to support you with telehealth consultations, medication optimisation, and multidisciplinary care until we can safely do your procedure.

Prescriptions

We understand that this is a difficult time for patients who are trying to get ongoing supplies of their prescription medicines. We are able to fax/email prescriptions directly to your usual pharmacy and then post the original in the mail. Pharmacists are currently able to supply a patient’s usual S4 (non-narcotic) medications without a prescription under certain conditions (discuss with your usual pharmacist). For S8 (narcotic type) medications we can provide a prescription for some of our patients. Please contact us to discuss further.