About Whakakotahi

The Commission’s focus on primary care includes partnerships with primary care teams to work on small-scale improvement projects through its quality improvement programme, Whakakotahi (te reo Māori for ‘to be as one’).

The aim of Whakakotahi is to increase quality improvement capability in primary care. Primary care teams are supported by the Commission to implement quality improvement projects on an area of patient care they want to improve that is important to their patients/community and to them as providers of care. The three focus areas for Whakakotahi projects are:

• equity
• integration
• consumer co-design.

The Commission’s primary care programme team supports and mentors participating primary care teams through site visits and group learning events. Some team members have taken part in the quality improvement facilitators course, run by Ko Awatea.

Whakakotahi acts as a catalyst for starting valuable discussions with primary care, raising the sector’s capability to use data to inform their project work, learn about improvement science to achieve better patient care and outcomes, and laying important foundations for future improvement work in primary care.

More specifically, the aim of Whakakotahi is to increase quality improvement capability in primary care by:

• building collaborative partnerships between the Commission and primary care to improve primary care quality and the Commission’s understanding of it
• improving one or more health outcomes with associated improvements in equity, integration and consumer co-design
• supporting sector-led improvement projects to build and spread improvement science expertise and skills in the primary care sector which are data-informed, and equity focused
• identifying improvement projects/initiatives that are suitable for implementing at a local, regional or national level (as appropriate)
• supporting the implementation of the System Level Measures Framework, by linking improvement projects to the framework
• raising improvement science capability in the primary care setting.

Related Resources

Resource: Whakakotahi evaluation reports