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Why Brisbane Patients Are Waiting Longer For a Dermatologist Appointment

August 18, 2026

Anyone who’s tried to get a specialist referral moving quickly in the past year has probably noticed the wait stretching out. It isn’t a Brisbane quirk. The problem is structural, and it’s playing out across the country.

A workforce that hasn’t kept pace

Australia currently has around 590 practising dermatologists, which works out to roughly two specialists for every 100,000 people in the country. Against a population where two in three Australians will develop some form of skin cancer by age 70, that ratio looks thin.

The Australasian College of Dermatologists only graduates 20 to 25 new specialists a year. Training positions are capped by funding, not by a shortage of interested doctors, so the bottleneck is administrative as much as it is medical.

College representatives have pushed for a roughly 50 percent increase in registrar numbers, arguing the current training pipeline was built for a much smaller population than Australia now has. A proposed $6 million investment over four years, spread across additional training positions, is a modest ask given the size of the shortfall it’s meant to address.

Even if that funding materialises, the earliest graduating cohort under an expanded program won’t enter the workforce until 2027 at the soonest. That lag is the part patients rarely see: policy fixes take years to show up as shorter waitlists.

What this looks like on the ground

In practice, GPs are fielding more skin checks themselves, referral queues are longer, and patients with non-urgent but still concerning lesions can wait months for a specialist opinion. Regional patients feel this most acutely, but even inner-city Brisbane clinics report booking calendars filling out weeks in advance.

Clinics that can offer rapid nurse triage or shorter windows between referral and consultation have become disproportionately valuable in this environment. Patients who do get seen promptly, including those seen by the Dermatology Clinics Australia team in Newstead, increasingly describe that speed as the deciding factor in where they book.

The way people judge a clinic has shifted. Five years ago the conversation was mostly about technology and technique. Now it’s just as often about whether you can get in the door within a reasonable timeframe.

Where the pressure goes next

Pilot programs in Townsville and Darwin are testing telemedicine models and visiting specialist arrangements to stretch the existing workforce further. Whether similar approaches expand into South East Queensland depends largely on funding decisions still working their way through health department budgets.

Inadequate Medicare rebates for private dermatology consults compound the problem, pushing out-of-pocket costs higher for patients who are already reluctant to seek care early. Workforce researchers see this as a parallel issue to raw specialist numbers, since even a bigger workforce wouldn’t fix access if cost remains a barrier for lower-income patients.

Some proposed remedies look outside the traditional specialist-only model entirely. Extending limited prescribing or triage authority to appropriately trained nurses and GPs, an approach already used overseas, keeps coming up in workforce discussions, even though it remains politically contentious among some specialist bodies protective of scope-of-practice boundaries.

In the meantime, the advice from workforce researchers is simple: book early, don’t wait for a lesion to change before seeking an opinion, and treat a same-week nurse consult as a real advantage rather than a nice-to-have. The shortage is a system-level problem, but individual patients still have to work around it one appointment at a time.

Brisbane’s dermatology capacity isn’t shrinking. Demand is growing faster than supply, and that gap is the real story behind the longer waits patients are reporting this year. A longer wait isn’t evidence of a badly run clinic. It reflects a national capacity problem that no single practice can solve on its own.

Google Quietly Unlocked Vehicle Ads From Performance Max, and Dealers Got Their Budgets Back

August 6, 2026August 6, 2026

For most of the time this format has existed, running it meant accepting a trade. You handed Google your stock feed and, with it, control over where the money went.

That trade stopped being compulsory in May.

Google published a help page confirming that Google Vehicle Ads can now run through Standard Shopping campaigns, not just Performance Max. Someone spotted the documentation change on 3 May 2026 and the trade press picked it up within days. No launch event, no blog post. Just a page appearing in the help centre that changes how an entire category of advertiser can work.

Performance Max Was Always an Awkward Fit for Car Stock

Performance Max runs on a simple premise. Give the algorithm a goal and a budget, let it handle channel allocation, audiences, bidding and creative.

That works when you’re selling interchangeable products with predictable margins. It works considerably less well when every unit is distinct, geographically anchored, and worth five figures.

A dealership doesn’t have a catalogue in any normal sense. It has a forecourt that changes daily. A three-year-old diesel estate sitting past ninety days and quietly costing money is not a variation of the nearly-new hybrid that will sell itself by Thursday, and treating them identically isn’t efficiency.

Complaints had been building for a while. Advertisers running serious monthly spend reported budget drift and over-indexing on remarketing, with no way to push spend toward a specific channel. Google’s own Ads Product Liaison has acknowledged the system is built conversion-first, not channel-first.

Fine for low-margin retail. Less fine when a fifth of your budget quietly migrates to remarketing on the campaign that was supposed to shift ageing stock.

What You Get Back

The restored controls aren’t glamorous but they’re substantial.

Bidding becomes explicit: Manual CPC, target CPA, target ROAS, Maximise Clicks or Maximise Conversions, instead of whatever the automation decides serves your conversion goal. Budgets become fixed instead of suggestive, and total campaign budgets, extended to Standard Shopping in a global open beta on 15 January, let you set a hard spend cap across three to ninety days.

Product groups are the most useful piece. You filter which vehicles enter a campaign by make, model, year, or any attribute in the feed. Build one campaign around aged units, another around fast movers, fund them separately. Performance Max offers nothing equivalent.

Location targeting becomes direct. A retailer in Carlisle has no commercial interest in appearing in Plymouth, and now that restriction can be stated instead of hoped for. Search partner sites, included by default, can also be switched off.

The Setup Requirements Haven’t Softened

Three accounts have to be connected before anything exists: Google Ads, Merchant Center, and a Google Business Profile. Multi-site groups whose local listings are handled by a third party can submit store feed data through Merchant Center instead.

Merchant Center also has to hold approved vehicle offers before the vehicle feed option even appears during setup. This is the step that catches people. Vehicle feeds aren’t retail product feeds with different labels. They want make, model, year, price, mileage, VIN and store code, and the approval process is unforgiving about gaps.

France, Italy, Spain and Germany have required a first-registration date on used vehicles since January 2025. Feeds missing it don’t serve. Not “underperform”. Don’t serve.

Two settings lock permanently at publication: campaign type and the linked Merchant Center account. Neither can be changed afterwards, so the Standard Shopping versus Performance Max decision needs making before launch, not after a fortnight of data.

Both Paths Can Run Together

Framing this as a choice between systems is probably wrong. Google’s documentation is explicit that the two campaign types can run alongside each other, and that’s likely how most serious operations end up.

Performance Max handles broad reach across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Standard Shopping handles the segments where control beats reach: ageing inventory, specific model lines, anything with a hard budget ceiling. Campaign priority settings exist for exactly this, deciding whose budget applies when a vehicle appears in more than one campaign.

The direction of travel is the odd part. Google spent much of 2025 nudging advertisers toward Performance Max, including a September interface change that defaulted campaign setup that way, and several practitioners read that as Standard Shopping being wound down.

This update points the other way, at least for automotive. Google hasn’t explained why, and the documentation says what it says.

The control exists now. Most campaigns were built when it didn’t.

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