A GP prepares a chronic condition management plan for a patient with Type 2 diabetes. The plan includes referrals to a podiatrist for foot assessment and a dietitian for dietary counselling. Both referrals go out on the same day. The podiatrist receives their referral by fax and calls the patient by Wednesday. The patient books and is seen within two weeks.

The dietitian’s referral also arrives, also on Monday. It gets placed in a pile. Nobody calls the patient. By the time someone from the dietetics clinic follows up three weeks later, the patient has found a dietitian closer to home.

Same condition. Same GP. Same patient. Two different outcomes, because of one difference in process.

Why podiatry and dietetics practices receive the same patients

Podiatry and dietetics sit at the centre of chronic disease management in Australia, particularly for patients with diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and chronic kidney disease. These conditions are typically managed under a GP Chronic Condition Management Plan (GPCCMP), the framework introduced from 1 July 2025 to replace the former GP Management Plan and Team Care Arrangements (TCA).

Under the GPCCMP, a GP develops a plan for a patient with a chronic condition and refers them to relevant allied-health providers. The patient can access a capped number of subsidised allied-health services per calendar year, with that allocation shared across all providers they see under the plan. This means a patient referred to your podiatry clinic may also be seeing a dietitian, exercise physiologist, or physiotherapist under the same annual cap.

For podiatrists and dietitians, this creates a referral environment where:

The referral clusters are predictable. A GP caring for a diabetes patient will often refer to two or three allied-health providers at the same time. Podiatry and dietetics are among the most common pairings, alongside exercise physiology.

Visit-limit tracking matters. Because the patient’s subsidised visit allocation is shared, knowing how many visits they have used across all providers tells you how many remain. A patient who has used several visits with an exercise physiologist may have fewer subsidised podiatry sessions available than the referral letter implies.

Chronic-condition patients have ongoing referral needs. Unlike a single-episode referral for an acute injury, GPCCMP referrals often reflect long-term management. A patient may be referred each year under a new plan, or their GP may send a renewal referral mid-year if the clinical picture changes.

How referrals actually arrive

At most podiatry and dietetics clinics, inbound referrals arrive by fax, email, or letter the patient brings in. In some cases, a patient calls to book and mentions their GP recommended them without sending a formal referral, and the referral document follows later.

None of this is unusual. It is the standard reality of allied-health referral administration in Australia. What varies is how practices handle what arrives.

A practice with a clear intake process captures every referral as a tracked item from the moment it arrives, assigns a follow-up action, and contacts the patient within two business days. A practice without that process gets the same referrals but converts a smaller proportion of them into booked appointments.

The leakage problem for chronic-condition referrals

Referral leakage is the gap between referrals received and appointments actually booked. It affects all healthcare practices that receive inbound referrals, but it has particular characteristics in podiatry and dietetics.

Chronic-condition patients are often managing multiple providers. A patient with Type 2 diabetes might be seeing their GP, a specialist endocrinologist, a podiatrist, and a dietitian. Coordinating all of that is complex for the patient. The appointment that feels least urgent on any given week is the one most likely to be deferred, and dietary counselling or a routine foot check can easily slip behind a specialist appointment in the patient’s mental queue.

Many referrals are for preventive care. A podiatry referral for diabetic foot screening is preventive: the patient has no acute foot problem. That makes it easy to put off. By the time a problem develops, the GP referral may have been long forgotten.

The GPCCMP process can confuse patients about their entitlements. Some patients receive a chronic condition management plan and are unclear which services it covers, how many visits they get, or whether they need to bring the plan document to each appointment. That confusion is a quiet booking barrier.

Referrals arrive and go untracked. Without a structured intake process, referrals at busy podiatry and dietetics clinics can fall through the cracks, particularly during high-volume periods or when staff are covering for each other.

Visit-limit tracking: why it matters more here

Of all the allied-health disciplines, podiatry and dietetics are particularly affected by shared GPCCMP visit allocations because patients with chronic conditions often need multiple allied-health providers simultaneously. A patient referred for podiatry foot care and dietetic counselling at the same time has to manage a shared annual cap across both.

If your clinic does not know how many GPCCMP visits the patient has already used in the current calendar year, you may be planning a course of care that the subsidy will not support, or having that conversation unexpectedly at the second or third appointment.

Capturing this at intake, not at billing, is the cleaner approach. When the referral is logged, note the information available about the patient’s current GPCCMP status. If it is not on the referral document, the first patient contact is a natural opportunity to ask.

A real scenario with numbers

A podiatry clinic receives 25 inbound referrals per month, roughly 18 under the GPCCMP and 7 private. Industry referral-to-appointment conversion data suggests that around 15 to 25 percent of referred patients may not convert to a booked appointment without active follow-up.

At the low end, that is four patients per month who were referred to the clinic and never seen. At a standard podiatry consultation fee of $90 to $130, the direct revenue impact is $360 to $520 per month. Across a year, $4,300 to $6,200 in appointments that the clinic was referred but did not convert.

A dietetics clinic receiving 20 referrals per month with the same conversion assumptions loses three to five appointments per month, at $80 to $150 per consultation: $240 to $750 monthly, or $2,900 to $9,000 annually.

Neither of these practices would describe themselves as having a referral problem. The referrals are arriving. But the quiet loss accumulates.

What better referral management looks like

The process is consistent regardless of whether the referral is for podiatry, dietetics, or any other allied-health discipline.

Log every inbound referral immediately. Every fax, every email attachment, every patient-carried letter gets entered into a single tracked queue the moment it arrives. Not logged at end of day, not delegated to whoever is free: logged at arrival.

Contact the patient within 48 hours. A brief SMS or phone call within two business days is the most effective single change a clinic can make to improve booking conversion. The message is simple: “We have received your referral from Dr [name]. Here is how to book your first appointment with us.”

Note the GPCCMP visit status. Capture any information about the patient’s current annual allied-health allocation at the time the referral is logged. Follow up if the information is missing.

Follow up with non-bookers. If the patient has not booked within five to seven days of the initial contact, one follow-up touchpoint recovers a portion of them. Most leakage is not deliberate; it is deferred intention.

Track your conversion rate. Referrals received versus appointments booked is the metric that tells you whether your intake process is working. Without it, you cannot improve.

How SimpleRef helps podiatry and dietetics clinics

SimpleRef tracks every inbound referral from arrival to booked appointment, regardless of the referral channel or pathway. For podiatry and dietetics clinics, that means a single board showing every GPCCMP and private referral, automated patient outreach via SMS and email, and analytics that show the conversion rate across any time period.

You can tag referrals by type, capture visit-limit notes alongside the referral record, and flag any referral that has stalled at the booking stage. The system is designed for practices that receive inbound referrals, which is exactly the position a podiatry or dietetics clinic sits in.

The bottom line

Podiatry and dietetics clinics sit at the centre of chronic disease management in Australia, and the GPCCMP means that referral volumes in these disciplines are tied directly to the management of conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease. That is a steady, significant referral stream, but only the practices that actively manage the intake process convert it reliably into booked appointments.

Visit-limit tracking, fast first contact, and conversion measurement are the three habits that close the gap between referrals received and appointments delivered. They are not complicated, but they require a consistent process applied to every referral, every time.

For the broader allied-health referral management picture, read Referral Management for Allied Health Practices. For a deeper look at the referral leakage problem, see What Is Referral Leakage?. If you run a different discipline, see our guides for physiotherapy clinics and psychology practices.

To see how this works for your clinic, start a free trial or explore the full feature set.

Referral Management for Podiatry and Dietetics Clinics