On 1 July 2025 the two long-standing chronic disease plans — the GP Management Plan and the Team Care Arrangement — were replaced by a single GP Chronic Condition Management Plan. If you live with an ongoing condition, this is the piece of Medicare admin most likely to affect you.
What a care plan is actually for
A chronic condition management plan is a written plan for a condition that is going to be part of your life for a while — type 2 diabetes, asthma, COPD, heart disease, chronic kidney disease, arthritis, persistent mental health conditions, and many others.
The plan sets out what the condition is, what you and your GP are aiming for, what you will each do, and which other health professionals are involved. It is not a formality. It is the mechanism that turns “we should keep an eye on that” into scheduled reviews, named targets and Medicare-subsidised access to allied health.
The other thing it does is make your care legible to everyone involved. Your podiatrist, your dietitian and your specialist can work from the same plan your GP is working from. See how we manage chronic conditions.
What changed in July 2025
Before that date there were two separate plans. A GP Management Plan set out the plan itself, and a Team Care Arrangement organised the other providers involved. Most patients needed both, which meant two appointments, two documents and a requirement that at least two other providers formally agree to take part.
Since 1 July 2025 there is one plan: the GP Chronic Condition Management Plan. The old ones ceased.
What is genuinely different
- One plan instead of two documents.
- Your GP no longer has to obtain formal agreement from two collaborating providers before the plan can be made.
- Allied health providers no longer have to confirm acceptance of a referral before you can be referred.
- The plan does not expire — but it needs to have been prepared or reviewed within the past 18 months for you to keep using it to access allied health.
- If you are registered with a practice through MyMedicare, the plan is prepared and reviewed at that practice.
None of this changes the clinical substance of your care. It removes friction that used to sit between the decision to make a plan and the plan actually existing.
Allied health under a plan
This is the part most patients care about. With a chronic condition management plan in place, you can access up to five individual Medicare-subsidised allied health services per calendar year on referral from your GP. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients the allowance is ten.
Those five can be spread across the providers that make sense for your condition — a podiatrist and a dietitian, or a physiotherapist and an exercise physiologist, or another combination your plan supports. Each service has to run at least 20 minutes and needs a referral letter from your GP.
Patients with type 2 diabetes can also access up to eight group services per calendar year — dietetics, diabetes education and exercise physiology — on top of the individual allowance, after a suitability assessment. See diabetes care.
Worth knowing: the five services reset each calendar year, not on the anniversary of your plan. If it is October and you have not used them, that is worth a conversation.
How often the plan gets looked at
A plan can be prepared once every 12 months and reviewed every three months where that is clinically useful. In practice, most people settle into a rhythm of a review every three to six months — more often when something is changing, less often when things are stable.
A review is not a rubber stamp. It is the appointment where you check whether the plan is actually working: whether the numbers have moved, whether the medicines still suit, whether the allied health referrals were useful, and whether the goals still make sense. See care plan reviews.
If you already had a GP Management Plan
Patients who had both a GP Management Plan and a Team Care Arrangement in place before 1 July 2025 can keep using them to access allied health services until 30 June 2027. From 1 July 2027 a GP Chronic Condition Management Plan is needed. There is no cliff edge.
What cannot happen is a review of an old plan under the new arrangement. To move across, your GP prepares a new GP Chronic Condition Management Plan — which, given it is now one document rather than two, is generally simpler than what it replaced.
If you are not sure what you have, ask at your next appointment or call the clinic on (02) 4311 3800. It is a reasonable question and we can look it up.
This article is general information for people in the Gosford and Central Coast area. It is not advice about your situation and it does not replace a consultation with your own doctor. If you are worried about a symptom, book an appointment or call us on (02) 4311 3800. In an emergency, call 000.
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