When TQ last caught up with Phoebe Bardsley, Go Locum was fresh off a $350,000 seed round, had just placed its first doctor in the remote Yurruwi community on the Crocodile Islands, and was quietly building something it hoped would fix Australia’s maldistribution of medical staff. That was then.

Today, Go Locum has facilitated more than 50,000 hours of care and grown its community to over 3,000 doctors and nurses. Those aren’t vanity metrics: each hour represents a shift covered in a hospital that might otherwise have gone without. Phoebe is still based in the Territory, but the postcode has changed significantly: she and her family are now living in East Arnhem Land, about as close to the problem as it’s possible to get.The platform that started by connecting junior doctors to locum work in regional Australia has quietly become something larger: a workforce infrastructure play, spanning multiple professions, multiple governments, and soon, multiple countries.

“When the people who use your product want to build it with you, it feels like you’re on the right track.”

THE TEAM THAT BUILT ITSELF

The Paspalis seed funding did what it was supposed to do: buy time and talent. But the best hires, Phoebe says, weren’t sourced from LinkedIn.

Prags, now Go Locum’s software developer, first crossed paths with co-founder Dr Josh Case at a UQ Ventures panel in 2023. He was an undergraduate, curious enough to ask whether nursing was on the roadmap. Josh told him it was too ambitious for where they were. Prags spent 2024 on the UQ Startup Adventure to Shanghai, and by January 2025 had joined the Go Locum team. His first brief? Building the nursing infrastructure he’d asked about two years earlier.

Dr Jess, now Head of Recruitment, came up through a different route: she used the platform as a locum doctor, understood it from the clinician side, and eventually crossed to the team that builds it. It’s the kind of organic growth that’s hard to engineer and harder to fake.

NT Government also came on board through the Paspalis Co-Investment Fund, a signal that government sees Go Locum not just as a startup, but as part of the infrastructure required to fix a broken workforce system.

NURSING IS NOT JUST MEDICINE IN SCRUBS

Expanding into nursing was always part of the plan. It has also been, Phoebe admits, harder than expected.

With doctors, the team had an insider advantage: Josh is one. They understood the workflow, the pain points, the culture. Nursing is a different community, with different behaviours and different expectations. The technology scales easily enough; the trust doesn’t.

“You cannot assume that what worked for doctors will work for nurses,” Phoebe says. “Trust needs to be rebuilt from scratch.” Their new nursing lead Max is starting imminently, and the team is approaching that market with patience earned the hard way.

REMOTE IS THE POINT

Go Locum’s first remote placement, in Yurruwi, was a milestone. Then Phoebe’s family moved to East Arnhem Land for her partner Ed’s hospital role, and the milestone became lived reality.

“Living remotely has given me a deeper appreciation for the complexity of delivering care to communities like these,” she says. The insight that followed wasn’t just personal: it changed how the platform thinks about its role in the remote health market.

Filling a shift is the easy part. The harder work is preparing clinicians for everything outside the clinical work itself: community protocols, cultural safety, the logistics of isolation, the weight of continuity. Remote communities, Phoebe is clear, do not want a revolving door of strangers. They want clinicians who come back, who learn people’s names, who understand the context.

Go Locum’s platform now tracks placement history and matches on experience as much as availability, For more information on the Paspalis portfolio of investments visit paspalis.com.auhelping health services build a more consistent workforce rather than patching gaps as they appear. The team is keen to connect with more Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations around the country.

“Communities don’t want a revolving door of strangers. They want clinicians who come back.”

RUNNING NATIONAL FROM ARNHEM LAND

Nhulunbuy recently lost its only GP clinic. For Phoebe, workforce shortage is no longer a policy abstraction: it’s the reason her neighbours can’t see a doctor this week. “This is not theoretical for us,” she says, with the quiet firmness of someone who has watched the system fail people she knows by name.

Running a national platform from East Arnhem Land is possible, she says, because Go Locum was designed to be fully remote from day one. Josh is on the Sunshine Coast. The rest of the team is distributed across every state. Distance is a feature, not a bug: it keeps the company honest about the problem it’s trying to solve, and keeps Phoebe close to the communities she is building for.“

In Brisbane or Sydney, workforce shortages can sound like policy,” she says. “In the remote communities we service, they mean your local clinic cannot see you this week.

”WHAT COMES NEXT

The next phase is about leverage. The platform is built, the team is in place, and the trust with government clients — from the NT to NSW to Tasmania — has been established over years of delivery. Now Go Locum is looking at expanding across other health professions and, for the first time, internationally.

The strategic investment from the NT Government Co-Investment Fund added more than capital: it added legitimacy. When government backs you as part of the solution to a broken workforce system, doors open. Go Locum is walking through them.

From a lightbulb moment in a health analytics dataset to 50,000 hours of care delivered, the distance Phoebe and her team have travelled is considerable. The map, though, still has plenty of blank space left to fill.