Capital Health Network

CHN, ACT’s PHN innovated and refined its practice support capabilities over the last year, particularly in light of COVID-19 severely impacting primary care. Following ongoing feedback from the sector, and recognising the impact that the pandemic has had on the ability of practices to respond to non-COVID issues, we refined our support model while promoting quality improvement (QI) and building new foundations for QI within the practice.

Guiding the development of the refined model were the insights gained from our engagement within primary care, the primary care data we receive from practices and the results from our ongoing CHN Needs Assessment process. Over the last year, we have had over 1,600 engagements with primary care, ranging from GPs, Practice Nurses, Practice Managers and other practice staff. Significant areas of support our team covered included:

• COVID-19 vaccine rollout
• quality improvement initiatives
• business continuity supports
• Medicare Benefits Schedule
• accreditation
• education events
• general practice support.

While the model’s implementation is still in its early stages, we have already seen an increase in primary care engagement, improved orientation and prioritisation of QI and a renewed interest in data analysis.

While we take pride in being responsive to the needs of general practices, we have also taken the opportunity to develop a range of resources which focus on the issues that practices identify time and time again as areas they would like to improve. As such, CHN has produced dynamic, quality improvement (QI)-focused and data-oriented resources for primary care, through the Quality Improvement Kit (QuIK). QuIK has three different core features: QuIK Library, QuIK Cycle and QuIK Snapshot. The QuIK Library is the home to our dynamic resources which provide context for QI and is separated into four areas:

1. Foundation
2. Patient
3. Practitioner
4. Pathway.

The QuIK Cycle represents our collaboration with practices. Based on the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) framework, CHN creates small cycles for priority QI areas within a practice.

Finally, the QuIK Snapshot is our refined approach to representing a practice’s de-identified data shared with CHN. The Snapshot is crucial as it identifies valuable QI opportunities within a practice’s context.