The Peri-Operative Services Fee is similar to a hospital admission and theatre fee.

It is charged by the clinic to provide the doctors with specialised services from before, during and after the procedure.

These services allow our doctors to provide the optimal care.

Pre-operative surgical preparations by our nursing team.

Post-operative after hours care by our nursing team and on-call doctors.

Post-operative scar minimisation silicone scar reduction gel to be used after removal of sutures and customised scar reduction advice (plus taping if appropriate).

In addition, these are some of the other items we use in our procedures

• Customised, 3 component local anaesthetics for reduced stinging and bleeding
• 2 layer sutures with one deep dissolvable layer, 
• Electric cautery
• Double surgical preps

There are 2 levels of POS fee.

Standard applies to the most common linear (ellipse) excisions on the forearms, upper arms, chest, abdomen, shoulders and upper back.

Advanced applies to linear excisions on other areas of the body, or other types of complex closures such as wide local excisions, flaps or skin grafts.

Standard = $275
Advanced = $350 

* Current as of Nov 2022

Medicare was designed to rebate for a minimum standard of treatments.

The item number specified for a removal of a lesion does not include services listed above.

For example, currently there are no Medicare item numbers for services such as 2nd deep layer of sutures,  enhanced local anaethestics,  afterhours nursing support, or providing you with medical grade anti-scarring treatment.

We do not believe a minimum standard of treatment will lead to our target results in terms of patient comfort, follow up care and long term cosmetic outcome. The POS fee covers these additional services not covered by the basic Medicare rebate.

At present, health funds will only allow claims for procedure related costs if the patient is admitted to a hospital, as an "inpatient".

For example, the extra costs of having an CT guided injection in a radiology clinic will only be covered by health insurance if the patient is already a patient of a hospital, and not when the patient have the same procedure as a walk-in "outpatient".

This also means any excess for the hospital admission must be paid first to the health insurance to be considered an "inpatient".

We could shift our procedures to mini-day hospitals but any claim benefit would be offset by the need to pay an excess for the majority of our patients.

We hope this situation will change in the future.