Community Consultation Forums

Disability, Aged Care and Palliative Care

WQPHN hit the road in 2023 travelling to Winton, Cloncurry and St George, to host the third round of annual Community Forums.

This year’s forums focused on disability and aged care, and introduced palliative care. WQPHN was joined by esteemed peak bodies including National Disability Services (NDS), Council On The Ageing Queensland (COTA), Home Care Workforce Program (Skills Hubs), National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) and Palliative Care Queensland. These forums serve as an invaluable platform for direct communication with community members, enabling WQPHN and peak bodies to understand the challenges, successes, and most importantly rural and remote health priorities.

Community members shared insights, proposing solutions such as improved training, localised service schedules, and better access to information on available services. The importance of addressing connectivity issues, transport barriers, and empowering remote communities with knowledge about available visiting services also emerged as key priorities.

By fostering dialogue between communities, local government and peak bodies, WQPHN is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of Western Queenslanders, valuing the insights and contributions of community members and recognising their capacity for self-reliance and resilience.

HealthPathways

HealthPathways is a web-based clinical information portal designed and written by GPs in collaboration with specialists for use by clinicians during a primary care consultation.

Each pathway provides clear and concise guidance for assessing and managing a patient with a particular symptom or condition in primary care.

Pathways are continually being localised and updated to include information about making requests and referrals to hospital and community services in our local health system.

Since the Western Queensland HealthPathways site went live, usage has continued to increase:

Throughout 2022-2023, 59 new pages were localised in areas such as palliative care, dementia, respiratory medicine, children and adolescent health, endocrinology, cancer screening, dermatology, mental health and more.

Our clinical editors, Dr Karen Benn, Dr Anthony Vogelpoel, Dr Tiffany Clover and Dr Erica West continue to work hard to progress the localisation of pathways and keep referral information up to date.

Based on a recent WQPHN Needs Assessment, new work will focus on providing updates to information related to the leading causes of death and disease in Western Queensland.

Available 24/7 via a range of devices, Western Queensland HealthPathways supports clinicians with best practice information at the point of care. Visit our website for more information.

Palliative Care

The palliative care program focusses on supporting Western Queenslanders to have increased choice and live the life they want, ensuring quality of life is maintained when living with a life-limiting illness.

Highlights:

• A new partnership between WQPHN and Palliative Care Queensland was established to enhance palliative care accessibility and education across the WQPHN region, paving the way for an improved experience of palliative care for our communities.
• Ten engagement trips across the region provided increased understanding of the current experience and priorities regarding palliative care needs.
• The outback palliative care Community of Practice (CoP) was launched with grief Psychologist Judith Murray, providing insight into grief and loss and how health professionals can support healthy bereavement.
• The Specialist Palliative Rural Telehealth service (SPaRTa) and partners planning day and networking event drew sixty health care professionals together from across regional and rural areas of Queensland to co-plan access to specialist palliative care in remote Queensland.

Diabetes Care

Creation of the Primary Health Care (PHC) Dashboard has allowed visibility over the Diabetes outcomes provided in the Western Queensland region. Staff and Diabetes Qld now have access to identify the cohort of patients who have received care verses those who haven't, including the current cohort with clinical indicators of high HBa1C results who require further intervention from both PHC and Diabetes Educators commissioned by WQPHN.

WQPHN has rolled out training in the Primary Health Care Dashboard to GPs across the footprint.

The visibility of the burden of disease is now evident and with the training provided from WQPHN Practice Support staff, the disease management of Diabetes is targeted and transparent, based on outcomes of data collection.

After Hours Program & Digital Health in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACF)

Healthy Ageing in WQPHN continued to take a proactive approach to ageing and empower our older community members to be more informed and aware of their health, and to seek ways to live their lives with as much independence and value as they need.

To meet these needs aged care funding has focused on connection and providing information for the participants.

In the last financial year WQPHN:

• Provided guidance to assist participating RACFs in the region to develop and implement after-hours action plans which will support their residents to access the most appropriate medical services out-of-hours;
• Educated participating RACF staff in out-of-hours health care options and processes for residents;
• Encouraged participating RACFs to implement procedures for keeping residents' digital medical records up to date, particularly following an episode where after-hours care was required utilising My Health Record capabilities;
• Supported engagement between RACFs and their residents' GPs (and other relevant health professionals), as part of afterhours action plan development;
• Enhanced out-of-hours support for residential aged care strategy by providing better access to GPs in after hours and effective use of eHealth technology and systems.

Over the financial year, WQPHN worked with 23 Aged Care Services.

A total of 7,969 participants aged 65 years and above attended various early intervention activities totaling 2,103 occasions of service/group sessions.*

* It's important to note that the number of participants does not necessarily represent unique individuals, as older people have the flexibility to attend multiple occasions and types of early intervention activities during this period.

Digital Health

The digital health team has continued to engage with stakeholders through the Monthly Megabyte, our digital health newsletter, where we include information on digital updates, such as the new My Health Record app, myhealth, as well as training, opportunities, and resources.

Throughout the year, funding was provided directly to residential aged care facilities to improve their digital infrastructure to support telehealth, providing further support for afterhours planning, and training for My Health Record to improve continuity of care.

Targeted activities were also deployed to supported medical practices and pharmacies across Western Queensland to transition to NASH SHA-2 certificates as part of key health infrastructure upgrades.

As Provider Connect Australia Business Partners, we sought to create awareness and knowledge about Provider Connect Australia and encourage uptake across the region. We have worked with our partners across the health landscape as part of the Digital Health Information Sharing Workgroup and have recently begun work to uplift digital literacy through the Digital Health Literacy Mentorship Program.