Matthew Chudley, the National GP Recruitment and Engagement Manager at Ochre Health, says it is becoming increasingly difficult to find doctors across Australia. He added that Wollongong's official status as a metropolitan area that does not have a doctors' shortage adds to the areas woes.

Mr Chudley recently employed two new doctors at Ochre's Crown Street premises, but said there are still vacancies at the Wollongong practice.

However, like many other practices across the city, the service has been affected by the GP shortage.

"The government are saying that Wollongong is extremely metro and well-serviced with doctors, which is obviously not people's experience," he said.

"You can see from speaking to people in the community that it's hard to get a GP appointment in Wollongong.

"We've hired some new GPs - and that is great - but our medical centre could do with a couple more. However, we are a bit hamstrung by government regulations."

He said one of the main challenges in Wollongong was that it is was deemed MM1 under the federal government's "Modified Monash Model", which is used to define whether a location is a city, rural, remote or very remote.

Under the government rules, Wollongong is also not a "Distribution Priority Area", which identifies locations in Australia with a shortage of medical practitioners.

Mr Chudley said regional, rural and priority areas were eligible for various workforce incentives, with a wider range of doctors able to be appointed there.

However a place like Wollongong was "tricky", he said, as it was harder to employ doctors from overseas, because there was a requirement that they must have worked in Australia for at least 10 years.

"There's a thing called the 10 year moratorium which they have to satisfy before they can work in Wollongong," he said.

"Because Wollongong is not a [priority area], doctors subject to the moratorium aren't able to get billing provider numbers - which means you can't do Medicare primary care - there unless you've worked in Australia for 10 years, or can get an exemption."

Speaking to a Senate enquiry into general practitioner services for outer metropolitan, rural and regional areas in January, Mr Chudley explained that rules for certain overseas doctors has changed in 2018, which had also made things more difficult.

"There was a reciprocal agreement with UK GP training that allowed a lot of UK GPs to come to Australia with immediate registration as a specialist," he said.

"That came in in about 2010, and that in period from 2010 to 2018 there were thousands of GPs that came from the UK and Ireland in particular."

However, he said this changed in 2018, with registration requirements tightening for UK GPs wanting to work in Australia.

"We should be allowing comparably trained, suitably qualified GPs from overseas to come here - they do a good job," he said.

"There are things that can be done that would help fix this shortage, but people are too risk averse."

Mr Chudley said Ochre, which operates a network of 52 medical centres and supplies GPs to a number rural hospitals, would be amping up its advocacy for general practitioners with the change of government.

"There's a chance to fix this with a new government., and we will be going back out there to try to advocate for the industry," he said.