Project focus: The Future of Primary Care: A review of reform
We recently had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Dr Walid Jammal and Dr Kirsten Meisinger, taking us through the reforms outlined in Australia’s Primary Health Care 10 Year Plan 2023-2032.
Dr Jammal is co-chair (with Steve Hamilton) of the Primary Care Steering Group who made 90-odd recommendations across six themes that informed the development of the Plan and a member of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce. He spoke passionately about building a healthcare system that delivers strong end results for patients, and shared a vision for a high performing health system – one that is:
Accessible and equitable
Aligned to the model of care patients want and expect
Genuinely patient-centred and delivering continuous care
Based around longitudinal, preventative, multi-disciplinary team-based models of care (rather than episodic care)
Offers integrated and digitally enabled healthcare
Well-funded, cost-effective and functions with minimal waste.
He also painted a vivid picture of the ideal healthcare world for one patient, which sums up our Living Well vision nicely and worth sharing with you as a reminder of why we do what we do:
Imagine a world for one patient, May. May is in her seventies and lives an active life with involvement in her community. She has complex medical issues. She refers to her primary care team as “her team” and can access the care she needs by making appointments via phone, email and app. She can also access her results via a portal at any time.
May gets continuous care and doesn’t have to tell her story every single time she sees a health professional – every person in her care team has her information and communicates with each other frequently, seamlessly and easily. Everything she needs is done according to preventative health evidence-based guidelines and her care plan, and what she needs happens at every single visit. Her care plan also gets updated every visit because it’s a live, editable document. When she’s not visiting her general practice, her team worries about her and offers outreach services and monitors her condition. Her team talks to her. They ask her what matters to her. May’s team compares that longitudinally with May, herself, and use patient reported outcomes to compare the progress of their entire registered patient population.
The world that May lives in is the world we envisage, too, and Dr Jammal’s presentation left us hopeful for the future of healthcare in our region and reassured that our Living Well collaborative commissioning initiative is well-aligned to these reforms.
To read more about the 10 Year Plan, download a copy at: www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/australias-primary-health-care-10-year-plan-2022-2032
