New Brisbane Centre will lead Aboriginal health success
August 23 2009
Queensland’s boast of being the smart state and national efforts to close the
Indigenous health gap will get a boost this week with the launch of a new centre to
support primary health care centres to deliver high quality care to Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people.
One21seventy, the National Centre for Quality Improvement in Indigenous Primary
Health Care will be launched in Brisbane on Tuesday afternoon.
One21seventy emerges from a highly successful research project, the Audit and
Best Practice in Chronic Disease (ABCD) project, which provided support to more
than 120 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services around the country to
use Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) methods.
According to project leader, Professor Ross Bailie from the CRC for Aboriginal
Health and the Menzies School of Health Research, the outcomes clearly
demonstrate that Indigenous primary health care services are achieving better
health outcomes through the use of quality improvement.
“The model used is a major success story of Indigenous primary health care,
influencing funding programs such as Healthy for Life and finally leading to the
establishment of this new national Centre which will provide services to primary
health care centres that want to use CQI methods,” said Professor Bailie. “This new
centre will be critical in ensuring that we build on the demonstrated successes of the
ABCD project with several State and Territory governments already indicating their
strong interest in using the Centre to provide these services within their regions.”
Health centres taking part in the project have seen substantial improvement in most
key indicators for both diabetes and preventive care with more than 100%
improvement over baseline performance in some cases.
“Services in Nth Qld which only joined the project last year are already seeing some
significant improvements” said Bailie. “These sorts of improvements in the quality of
primary health care, lead to improved quality of life, reduced complications,
hospitalisations and deaths for people in these communities, while reducing costs to
the health system.”
One21seventy supports health providers to measure and improve quality of care in
a
range of illnesses effecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people including
maternal and child health, diabetes, renal disease, hypertension and coronary heart
disease, mental health and rheumatic heart disease.
The new Centre will be launched at the Royal on the Park Hotel in Brisbane on
Tuesday August 25 at 530pm, as part of the ABCD project’s annual conference.
The event will be attended by more than 140 people from Indigenous health
services throughout Australia, and senior health policy people from Federal and
State/Territory jurisdictions.
The annual conference will include the reporting of some important new findings on
uptake and sustainability in the adoption of new interventions; findings which while
specifically about the ABCD model are of much broader application in Indigenous
affairs and primary health care.
One21seventy Executive Director, Mr Christopher Cliffe, is a remote area nurse and
President of CRANAplus, the national professional body for remote health
providers. “Indigenous health services are leading the way in the use of these CQI
methods in primary care in Australia, and to some extent, the world. The new
Brisbane-based One21seventy will continue this ground-breaking work,” said Mr
Cliffe.
The CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, Mr Mick
Gooda, has welcomed the launch of One21seventy.
“High quality care is critical to improving Aboriginal health. This new Centre
provides a mechanism to ensure that not only can health centres steadily improve
the delivery of services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but they can
access new evidence about best practice as it emerges through the work of
organisations like the CRCAH and Menzies,” he said.
For more information:
Alastair Harris - CRC for Aboriginal Health Communications – 0409 658 177
Christopher Cliffe – Executive Director, One21seventy – 0427 826 409
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