NSW takes the lead with connected healthcare
NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner tells AAA her new ‘integrated care strategy’ will change how healthcare is delivered in Australia’s largest state, and that older people will be among the major beneficiaries.
The NSW Government has this morning released its integrated care strategy, which provides a framework for greater collaboration among the various players in the health system and encourages partnerships between hospitals and community-based services.
The goal is to provide so-called seamless or connected healthcare, which would particularly benefit older people who currently struggle to navigate the disjointed health system.
The State Government is providing $120 million over four years to fund the strategy’s implementation across the system.
NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner said the strategy had been in development since 2009 when, as then shadow health minister, she argued for a reform of the governance of NSW Health from eight large health services into local health districts (LHD).
“I said one of their roles would be to facilitate the development of partnerships which would provide a seamless range of health services to people who need them, whether that involved hospital treatment or community-based primary healthcare,” she told Australian Ageing Agenda.
“I had been shadow health minister since 1995, and in my 20 years in parliament I have spent 19 years involved in health. I had developed very good relationships with people working right across the system. I had traveled overseas and talked to people there about the challenges; because this is an international issue. We have to find better ways of providing that seamless range of healthcare.”
The LHDs play a central role in the integrated care strategy and are charged with developing partnerships with other players in their area – from GPs to allied health and aged care.
The strategy has highlighted three LHDs as “demonstrator models” – western NSW (covering a rural area), Central Coast and Western Sydney, Ms Skinner said.
“One of the Western NSW sites is a village where the GPs are joining forces with the community health, with the hospital, with the LHD, to provide a much more integrated range of services for that particular community. There’s an example where you have a whole community being affected.”
Benefits
Ms Skinner said older people would be among the big beneficiaries of a more integrated healthcare system.
“I’m clear that everything we do is about putting the patient at the centre, getting the best deal and outcome for them. It just does not make sense to put patients who can be best treated at home by a GP into a hospital bed, where their routine must follow that of the hospital, rather than feeling calm and comfortable at home. For older people that is particularly the case.”
It would take several years for the strategy to be fully implemented across the system but it was nonetheless the way of the future, she said. “Today was a turning point in how we deliver healthcare in NSW, and others are watching us to see what we’re doing.”
Ms Skinner said aged care had a role to play in helping to achieve integrated healthcare.
“All of our LHDs will have an opportunity to come up with their models of care, and if any aged care providers, carers or older people themselves have any ideas about how it can be done better they should approach their LHD,” she said.
Australian Ageing Agenda will carry an in-depth report on new initiatives in integrated healthcare, including partnerships being driven by aged care organisations, in the forthcoming May June issue.
