July 2018 No Images? Click here SA information session draws 180 patientsA recent patient information session run by Goolwa Medical Centre and Country SA PHN attracted 180 prospective Health Care Home patients, with 130 patients subsequently booking in for enrolment consultations. The forum was the idea of practice manager, Brenda Allan, who has worked at Goolwa Medical Centre for 18 years. “We had [already] handpicked our first 20 Health Care Home patients. But we realised it was taking a long time for the doctors to talk to each of them,” Ms Allan said. “I started to think, How can we do this to save the GPs time? Couldn’t we do a patient information session on mass?” Country SA PHN agreed to book the venue for the day and attend to answer questions from patients. “We assisted with logistics and our practice facilitators also attended, along with Goolwa Medical Centre staff,” said Julie Di Rito, Assistant Manager Practice Support at Country SA PHN. Two weeks prior, the practice team had posted out 300 invitations to patients identified by the Risk Stratification Tool. They were pleased by the high turnout on the day. “We wanted to bring it all together for people. We’re in a small community and information about Health Care Homes was starting to filter out,” Ms Allan said. “Some people were a bit [unsure] and they didn’t understand the meaning of Health Care Homes,” she said. At the session, prospective patients “really wanted to know how it would work in our practice”. They liked hearing that Health Care Home patients have a care team behind them and connected this part of the program with the team at the practice who provide an exceptional level of care, Ms Allan said. “It was successful because it was simple. We kept it really simple, really personal,” she said. Interested in running a patient information forum?
Below: Country SA PHN’s Julie Di Rito with Goolwa Medical Centre’s first Health Care Home patient, John Kennett. Precedence visit to NT connects practicesPrecedence Health Care Integration and Implementation Director Jess Keating recently visited NT PHN and practices and ACCHS in Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs as part of an IT education and support visit. Sixteen practices participating in Health Care Homes in the NT use Communicare software. The visit ironed out some integration issues between Communicare and the cdmNet software, Ms Keating said. In some sites, the visit also helped build the confidence of staff in installing and running the Risk Stratification Tool, so that practices can begin enrolling patients. “We were able to get software installed, set up and tested and made sure it was working perfectly when we walked out the door, so that the practices would be able to start enrolling patients,” Ms Keating said. “While we have been working with a lot of these NT practices and their IT staff for a while, it was really good to put faces to names and for me to hear what the issues have been,” she said. Feedback from the visit has been positive, Ms Keating said. A clinical director from an ACCHS in Katherine said bringing together clinical, practice support, IT and PHN staff to discuss Health Care Homes systems and implementation had been extremely productive. Western Sydney clinical champions in the frame
Health Care Homes resourcesBookmark these pages for easy access: New palliative care online resourceInformation, resources and services for palliative care and advance care planning are now available on the End of Life Directions for Aged Care (ELDAC) website. The Minister for Aged Care, the Hon Ken Wyatt AM, MP launched the website on 15 June 2018. This online resource will support health professionals and aged care staff to provide care to senior Australians in residential aged care and the community. ELDAC includes:
ELDAC is funded by the Department of Health. It is managed by a consortium led by the Queensland University of Technology. National Advance Care Directive Prevalence Study 2018Advance Care Planning Australia (ACPA) is leading pioneering research to build a national picture of the prevalence of Advance Care Directives (ACDs) across all health and care services, and to evaluate how well an individual’s clinical care plan aligns with their documented personal preferences. We’re inviting GP clinics, hospitals and residential aged care providers to take part. Following a successful pilot study last year, the research involves auditing the health records of people aged 65 and over to determine the prevalence of ACDs and other advance care planning documentation. Applications close Thursday 26 July 2018. Find out more Why get involved? ACPA will send participating organisations a customised report presenting their results benchmarked against other de-identified participants. This will show how well advance care planning is being implemented within their service and help identify areas for improvement. Organisations that participate in future rounds of data collection will be able to track their progress over time. |