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The Health Quality & Safety Commission is seeking expressions of interest for primary health care improvement initiatives as we increase our focus on primary care and community services, aged residential care and disability services. Applicants can propose initiatives that are important to them and their enrolled population.

In 2014 the Commission hosted a workshop with primary care opinion leaders to identify important quality and safety issues and how the Commission can contribute. The primary care expert advisory group (PCEAG) was established as a result in 2015–16. The PCEAG, chaired by Dr John Wellingham, supports the Commission’s engagement with primary care providers, provides a primary care perspective on the Commission’s work and advises on future initiatives.

In response to the PCEAG’s advice, the Commission has agreed to a stronger focus on primary care. In the beginning this will involve designing and implementing a few small-scale primary care improvement initiatives to start valuable discussions and lay the groundwork for future, larger initiatives.

The Commission aims to increase quality improvement capability in primary care, with the following goals:

• build collaborative partnerships between the Commission and primary care to improve primary health care quality and our understanding of it
• improve one or more health outcomes with associated improvements in equity, integration and consumer engagement
• support sector-led initiatives to build improvement expertise and skills in primary health care
• identify initiatives suitable for implementing changes at a national level.

Priority areas

Initiatives for this project must support one or more of the Commission’s three primary care strategic priority areas.

1. Equity – all initiatives must be underpinned by consideration of equity in the design, implementation and evaluation phases.
2. Consumer engagement – consumer co-design will enable initiatives to move from ‘consumer experience’ to ideally reflect consumer journeys through health, including their impact on quality of life.
3. Integration – integrated patient-centred care will be a key priority, to provide seamless transitions of care. The initiative should target either the vertical gap between primary care and secondary care or the horizontal gaps across primary care and other social sector services, from the consumer perspective.

The Commission will work with the successful applicants to implement initiatives using methodology similar to the IHI breakthrough series (collaborative) methodology and will use its model for improvement. This includes bringing initiative teams together for three learning sessions for quality improvement capability building, sharing ideas and forming improvement networks. Between these learning sessions, the Commission’s quality improvement advisor and project manager will provide on-site support to improvement teams.

For more information or to apply download our guidelines and application pack.

Last updated 03/07/2017