Aboriginal-controlled, and still being built with community.

What this is

Bugalwah is a telehealth service for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. You talk to a nurse first, then see a doctor by video or phone, and there is no fee at either step. It happens wherever you are: no travel, no relocating, no waiting for the next time a visiting service comes through.

It is named for Bundjalung Country, which runs across the Northern Rivers of New South Wales and the far south-east of Queensland, from the Clarence up to the Logan and inland to the Great Dividing Range. The service is available Australia-wide, because someone in the Kimberley has the same trouble getting seen as someone in Casino.

Who decides things

Bugalwah is Aboriginal-controlled. How this service runs, who it is for and how it speaks to people are decisions made by Aboriginal people, not handed down by a board that has never been here.

That is the part worth checking rather than taking on trust, and it is checkable: ask who is on the board, ask who the clinical lead answers to, and ask what happens when community says a decision is wrong. A service that cannot answer those three questions is not controlled by the people it says it is.

What is still being built

This site is a starting point, not a finished thing. It is being built with community, and the parts that are wrong are meant to be said out loud and changed.

Concretely, the things not finished yet: the artwork on this site beyond the emblem is placeholder geometry rather than commissioned work; the practitioner names and their Ahpra registration numbers are not published here yet; and the design of the service itself is still being worked through with community rather than settled.

We would rather list those plainly than let the site imply a finished thing. If you are reading this and one of them has been sitting unfinished too long, that is a fair thing to ring up about.

What this is not

We are not your GP. We do one thing. Your Aboriginal Medical Service, your GP and your community health worker stay exactly where they are, and nothing about how we work is designed to take the rest of your care off them.

We are not a shopfront for a product. The doctor is paid for the consultation, at the same rate whether it ends in a prescription or in a considered no. There is no bonus for volume, nothing linked to a product, and no target anywhere in a clinical contract. We do not mark up medicine.

Why the money works the way it does

Paying for time rather than output is what everything else rests on. It means an appointment can run as long as it needs to, because a long one costs the same as a short one. It means when someone is told this is not the right treatment for them, that advice cost the service money and cost them nothing. And it means there is no reason to want more people through the door than actually belong here.

Accountability

Bugalwah is a service of Golden Ratio Clinics Pty Ltd. Consultations are held by practitioners holding current Ahpra registration, and clinical decisions, including what this service will and will not treat, sit with them.

If something goes wrong there is a complaints process, and you can also go straight to Ahpra or your state health complaints commissioner without coming through us first. That is your right and we are not going to bury it.

Telling us we have it wrong

The design of this service is not finished, and the point of building it with community is that community gets to change it. The contact page has a phone number and an inbox a person reads, not a feedback form that goes nowhere.