Primary Health Planning
The Illawarra Shoalhaven Medicare Local (ISML) will use the population health approach to identify local health needs and inform the development of focused and responsive primary care services
Strategies that the ISML is pursuing to address this goal include:
- developing an integrated health care services plan, in collaboration with the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District (ISLHD);
- developing and collating a regional population health data repository, including building a bank of reliable demographic, epidemiological and service-based datasets;
- promoting and participating in transitional research relevant to regional primary care through partnerships formalised with the ISLHD, University of Wollongong, government agencies and other key stakeholders, where applicable; and
- promoting increased uptake of practice data extraction and cleansing for clinical benchmarking and quality improvement.
The purpose, over time, is to apply the available evidence-base to address identified service gaps, within the organisation’s capacity e.g:
- monitor progressive development of the NHSD and populate data requirements as necessary;
- incorporate a population approach into inter-agency service planning for disease prevention and early intervention initiatives, focusing on targeted cohorts (e.g youth, Aboriginal people, CALD, rural, aged etc);
- identify priority areas for integrated aged care e.g workforce development, access, medication safety, e-health;
- develop mental health service models that target suicide prevention, Aboriginal people, children and their families plus women with perinatal depression across the whole ISML region; and
- promote and support communication tools between general practice and other health care providers for coordinated care planning and team care arrangements (e.g e-health initiatives, referral pathways).
