Associate Professor Luke Greskowiak

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69 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Associate Professor Luke Greskowiak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Health Report · An Alzheimer's blood test is on the way. What could that mean for you? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

We conducted a study utilising a large general practice research data set, and that involved information on more than one million individual females who were regularly presenting to

a general practice and we had just over 400 different general practices spread across Australia and in different states and territories as well as different regions in terms of major cities and rural and remote areas.

And so what we were interested in was two aspects.

The first was around discussing or describing, I guess, individuals that are seeking abortion care and how that's changed over that period of time, as you said, from 2014, which is the first full year since the listing of the medicines for medication abortion on our National Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

So that's why we started there.

And then we followed it up until the end of the data set that we had, which was in 2021.

So looking at who was accessing care and doing some descriptives around that, and then looking at who was providing the care.

So looking at specific general practices and where they're located as to who was and wasn't necessarily providing abortion care services.

Yeah, so the first one relating to access, we saw that the provision of medication abortion increased from one in 10,000 to around two in 1,000.

And to put that in context, the general rate in the Australian population is somewhat closer to 10 per 1,000.

So in the general practice or primary care space, we're still seeing in our data set that

the overall rate of access to abortion care is somewhat smaller.

But then when we look at the general practice level, what we saw was a good increase in terms of the proportion of practices providing medication abortion from one in 25 back in that first year up to closer to one in four in 2021.

We found some interesting differences in terms of variation in both access to the services and also the provision.

And so one of those interesting findings was the fact that potentially a good finding is that the proportion of general practices located in, I guess, outer regional and remote areas providing abortion care was higher than those located in major cities.

But even then, it was still only one in three.

of practices that were located in a regional or remote area that were providing medication abortion.

It certainly does.

And I think putting it in a different perspective for you, what we're able to look at is, so of those seeking abortion care that lived in an outer regional or remote area, one in five of those individuals were having to travel to an inner regional or major city

general practice clinic in order to receive their abortion care.

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