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Cross team collaboration enhances general practice
While COVID-19 support has dominated, the team has worked collaboratively across their areas and the organisation to leverage opportunities to further support primary care across the region.
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MPHN’s Primary Care Engagement team’s primary purpose is to support general practice and other primary healthcare providers by working on a range of projects and activities including COVID-19, quality improvement, digital health, Murrumbidgee HealthPathways, Continuing Professional Development (CPD), workforce recruitment and retention, seasonal planning and immunisation. It’s a large portfolio of work, and key to the team’s success has been a real focus on working across the various projects and activities within the team and across the organisation to coordinate and support primary care engagement. Senior Manager Primary Care Engagement Andrew Heap said the team have worked hard throughout the year to support primary care providers despite the ongoing challenges of COVID-19. “Even with the demands of supporting general practice, pharmacy and residential aged care facilities in relation to COVID-19, the team achieved more than 2,500 practice visits either in person or virtually, 236 practice engagements supporting childhood immunisations, nearly 1,000 people attended professional development opportunities, all eligible general practices and nearly all eligible pharmacies were enabled to use and accept ePrescriptions,” Andrew states. “It’s been a big year and I am proud of the dedication and enthusiasm of the team to go above and beyond to support the health providers who diligently ensure our communities are well and safe.”
Supporting patient consultations
Key to this success has been looking for opportunities to support primary health providers with various tools to streamline patient consultations. One such tool is GoShare Healthcare, which is an intuitive online tool for health practitioners to customise and send health information to patients via email or SMS. In the Murrumbidgee region, 35 of the 89 general practices have registered to use the GoShare platform. “General practices are able to incorporate GoShare into their routine practice workflow and the team is working to engage practitioners to utilise the platform effectively and seamlessly to support patient health literacy, knowledge and selfmanagement,” Andrew explains. To date there have been 4,505 information bundles sent including Why you should get your flu shot this season, COVID vaccinations, COVID precautions, 45-49yr health checks, 75+yr health checks and Heart Health checks. In addition to GoShare, Murrumbidgee HealthPathways supports clinicians with assessment, management and local referral information. MPHN’s Murrumbidgee HealthPathways Manager Briohny Hart said under the guidance of an active steering committee, almost 100 pathways and pages were developed or updated in line with key priorities this year. “This year’s focus was to ensure pathways were established or updated to further support commissioned services or identified needs, initiatives or focus areas. For example, with the implementation of the Enhanced Paediatrics in Primary Care program, we localised child and youth health paediatric pathways, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people pathways were updated to support the Integrated Team Care program, and pathways for older people were updated in relation to both dementia and aged care,” Briohny says. “The HealthPathways team implemented state-based pathways for SafeScript and COVID-19 and this relied on Primary Care Engagement teams to support training and implementation.”
Supporting digital health technologies
Supporting quality improvement
The digital health team worked on the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) project to upgrade NASH certificates and eRequesting to electronically request pathology tests across the region, achieving 98 percent 40 percent respectively of upgrades for the region’s general practices, pharmacy and medical specialists. The team also engaged with medical specialists and community health organisations to register them for the My Health Record system. The team also provides support in relation to ePIP (Practice Incentive Payments) compliance, telehealth and secure message delivery.
MPHN also provides general practices an opportunity to share de-identified data, which is used to generate Quality Improvement (QI) Benchmark Reports for participating practices. Primary Care Engagement Team leader Alison Jansen said there has been renewed interest in quality improvement and these reports are helping practices to get back to business as usual. “Our QI Benchmark Reports are a useful tool to guide practices with their quality improvement activities and identify opportunities to improve patient care. The Primary Care Engagement Officers review their practices’ reports in detail to provide suggestions for improvements, such as coding to recall patients with or at risk of chronic diseases, and easy identification of overdue routine health assessments to help foster streamlined systems and processes,” Alison explains. “The team also identifies missing health summary data to support practice accreditation requirements.” “Through our review process, we identified four general practices not receiving their ePIP and worked with Medicare, clinical software vendors, and IT support to reconnect My Health Record and assist them to continue to receive the ePIP,” explained MPHN’s Digital Health Officer Vimal Pasupathy. Implementation of NSW Health’s SafeScript, which assists general practitioners with real-time notifications for high-risk medications to reduce doctor shopping, was also supported by the digital health team with general practice and pharmacy implementation.
Healthpathways steering committee
• Dr Marietjie van der Merwe (Chair) – Senior Lead GP Clinical Editor HealthPathways • Dr Jane Goddard – GP Clinical Editor HealthPathways • Dr Jane Laloma – GP Clinical Editor HealthPathways • Dr Genevieve Thompson – GP Clinical Editor HealthPathways • Dr Elizabeth Campell – GP Clinical Editor HealthPathways • Dr. Isabel Paton (PhD) – MLHD Community Care Manager - Integrated Care & Allied Health • Andrew Heap – MPHN, Senior Manager Primary Care Engagement • Briohny Hart – MPHN, HealthPathways Manager • Olivia D’Souza – MPHN, HealthPathways Coordinator
Supporting professional development
Underpinning the practice and patient supports to general practice, pharmacy and other primary healthcare providers are regular opportunities for relevant and accredited professional development. MPHN’s CPD Coordinator Edyta Wrobel said it was important to provide training opportunities relevant to the current environment. “Obviously with the ever-changing COVID-19 environment, promoting and supporting a range of COVID specific CPD events was important and necessary for our primary healthcare providers. However, there were other key CPD events linked to specific team activities such as GoShare,
congratulations to
Dr Max Graffen on his retirement September 2021 after 40 years of service to the region. Additionally, Dr Graffen served on MPHN’s Board in its various iterations for a number of years including five as Chair.
Dr Gracy Gouda for being awarded Murrumbidgee and ACT Supervisor of the Year at the 2021 GP Synergy Awards in December 2021.
Supporting seasonal planning and immunisations
Eighteen general practices participated in the Living Well, Your Way Winter Strategy program, which included MediCoach coaching sessions. Relevant MPHN staff attended sessions to support practices with their Practice Action Plans like archiving old patient records, coding improvements, updating management processes, and recalling at-risk patients. MPHN’s Immunisation Support Officer Kate Warren said flu vaccines were a priority for the region given last year’s virtually non-existent flu season. ShareScript and the annual Immunisation Update,” Edyta explains. “Our 2021 Immunisation Update workshop had 98 registrations and 71 attendees, consisting of practice nurses and nurse immunisers from MLHD and the Kapooka Defence base. “Like the Immunisation Update the Antenatal Shared Care CPD event is always very well received, with workshop facilitators including a local GP obstetrician, who dedicate their time to share a wealth of knowledge to upskill local GPs in providing antenatal care for their patients.”
“With restrictions easing and borders re-opening, this winter saw an influx of both flu and COVID, and one measure to support practices was a presentation to the Practice Manager Network about recalling vulnerable patients for flu vax using GoShare Plus,” Kate says. “It was also critical for MPHN to support practices with the administration of flu vaccines, and also remind people to get their flu shot and to maintain good hand hygiene.” In addition to supporting flu vaccine administration and promotion, MPHN also supported general practice in the administration of all childhood vaccines.
