Telehealth Mental Health Demand in Australia Is Outpacing Intake

Telehealth use for psychology and psychiatry in Australia has been rising for well over a decade, not just since the pandemic normalised video calls, and the growth has not slowed. What has not kept pace is the capacity of clinics to answer the first phone call or message from someone trying to book that consult — which means a real share of that demand is being lost before a clinician ever sees it.

Demand for mental health care didn’t spike — it climbed for years

The pandemic gets most of the credit for telehealth’s growth, but the underlying demand curve was already steep. The number of people using a service subsidised under Australia’s Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) — the country’s public rebate scheme, not to be confused with any other nation’s Medicare — specifically for a mental health condition rose from 1.2 million (5.7% of the population) in 2008–09 to 2.7 million (10.6%) in 2018–19, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare — before COVID-19 changed anything about how care was delivered. By 2022–23, AIHW’s most recent figures put the total at 13.2 million MBS-funded mental health services delivered nationally, still to around 2.7 million people, with psychologists providing roughly half of all services and psychiatrists about a fifth.

That is the context that matters for a clinic weighing up its own booking process: this was not a short-lived surge that will fade once a backlog clears. It is a decade-long, structural rise in the number of Australians seeking a Medicare-subsidised mental health consult, and telehealth has become one of the main ways that consult happens.

Telehealth changes the shape of that demand curve in a way that matters for how a clinic answers it. A person walking into a physical waiting room is, by definition, already through the door — a receptionist can see them, and a delayed response is a matter of minutes. A person trying to book a telehealth mental health consult never gets that far unless the phone call connects or the message gets a reply. The entire first contact happens through a channel a clinic controls directly: its own line, its own inbox, its own after-hours message. There is no equivalent of simply walking in and waiting.

Telehealth didn’t just move consults online — it added capacity

A 2024 time-series study in the Australian Health Review looked specifically at what happened to psychiatric consultations once MBS telehealth items were expanded during the pandemic, comparing the period from January 2012 to February 2020 with March 2020 to December 2023. The study found that median monthly total consultations rose from 148,413 before the expansion to 173,016 after it, even as face-to-face consultations fell sharply, from a median of 143,726 to 99,272 a month. In plain terms: telehealth didn’t simply substitute for the in-person visits that disappeared — total psychiatric care delivered went up, and the authors concluded the change had “possibly … addressed previously unmet needs.”

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing tells a similar story from the patient’s side: 4.8% of Australians aged 16–85 accessed mental health support via phone or digital channels across 2020–2022, with usage highest among younger adults. A telehealth appointment for a mental health concern has moved from a pandemic workaround to a normal, expected way to reach a GP, psychologist or psychiatrist for a growing share of the population — which is exactly why the booking process around it now carries more weight than it used to.

Growth has outpaced the workforce that answers the phone

None of this growth has been free. The Australian Psychological Society, which represents around 25,000 psychologists, reported that use of Medicare-subsidised psychology services rose more than 20% between 2020 and 2022 alone — a pace that has outrun the supply of clinicians available to deliver it. APS President Dr Sara Quinn described the resulting picture bluntly in that same release: “long waitlists are the norm,” and workforce shortages mean “thousands won’t get the care they need.” The same release notes that close to a third of psychologists reported feeling emotionally exhausted in 2023, a workforce genuinely stretched by demand it cannot fully absorb.

The same release notes that the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists represents a further 7,500-plus psychiatrists — together with the APS, a combined workforce measured in the tens of thousands, absorbing a service volume that grew by double digits in just two years. Growth of that pace on a fixed clinical headcount was always going to show up somewhere. The peak bodies point to waitlists and burnout as where it lands for clinicians already seeing patients; the less visible place it lands is at intake, before someone becomes a patient at all.

That combination — rising demand, a workforce under real strain, and a booking channel that increasingly runs through telehealth rather than a walk-in — is the backdrop every clinic offering virtual mental health consults is now operating in.

The bottleneck often isn’t the therapist’s diary — it’s the first phone call

Every telehealth mental health consult still starts the same way it always has: someone calls, messages, or emails a clinic to ask for an appointment. None of the figures above measure what happens at that exact moment. AIHW counts services delivered. The ABS counts people who did access support. The APS speaks to waitlists once someone is already on one. None of them capture the person who rang during a lunch break, got a busy signal or a queue, and put the phone down.

That gap matters more here than in most other parts of healthcare. Reaching out for a first mental health appointment is already, for many people, a decision that took some effort to make. A missed call for a routine dental check-up is usually followed by another call the same afternoon. A missed call for a first psychology appointment, made at a moment the person had set aside to make it, does not always get a second attempt that same day — and a workforce already running long waitlists, per the Australian Psychological Society’s own account above, offers little slack to absorb people who do try again a week later, once the moment that prompted the call has passed. A clinic can be doing everything right clinically and still be losing a meaningful share of its own demand at the front desk, simply because the growth documented above has outpaced the administrative capacity to answer for it.

This is not a criticism of reception teams, who are usually already stretched covering appointments, referrals and billing during business hours. It’s a mismatch between when people decide to reach out — which, as the digital-access figures above suggest, increasingly includes evenings, weekends and moments outside a typical 9-to-5 window — and when a clinic’s phone line or inbox is actually staffed.

It is also a mismatch that telehealth itself makes larger rather than smaller. Precisely because a telehealth consult removes the need to travel to a physical location, it opens the door to people who would never have set foot in a clinic in the first place — someone booking from a regional area with no local psychiatrist, a shift worker whose only free hour is at 9pm, a person who feels more able to reach out by message than by walking into a reception desk. Those are, in many cases, exactly the people the workforce figures above suggest the system is already struggling to absorb through its existing channels. If the first contact with that person still depends on a landline being answered during standard business hours, telehealth has removed one barrier only to leave another one — intake — in place.

What this means for a clinic’s front desk

None of the national data changes what an individual clinic can control, which is what happens in the seconds after someone tries to make contact. A few practical checks are enough to see whether that first-contact gap exists in a given clinic, and to start closing it.

Closing that gap doesn’t require hiring more reception staff to cover hours no one wants to work. It requires making sure the first call or message is answered every time, at whatever hour it arrives, so the person on the other end gets a booking instead of a busy signal. That’s the specific problem Arbol is built for: an AI voice and WhatsApp agent that answers a clinic’s intake line and messages instantly, day or night, captures the person’s details, and gets them into the booking flow — so growth in demand for telehealth mental health care shows up as a filled appointment, not a call nobody picked up.

If your clinic operates in Australia, see how Arbol works for Australian clinics here, or visit the Arbol homepage for a broader look at how continuous intake coverage fits into everyday clinic operations.