Welcome to the Primary Care Services Improvement Project

Around the globe, many people live with a chronic illness and management of chronic diseases is now one of the major challenges facing health care systems. Chronic diseases management is a multi-faceted approach. It refers to the underlying structures in the primary care setting that reduce the health care fragmentation that can lead to poor health outcomes and inefficient use of resources. It has been noted that providing multi-disciplinary systematic care can improve the management and control of chronic diseases such as diabetes and depression. To this end, several initiatives in the Australian primary care setting (such as the Practice Nurse and various incentive programs such as Diabetes Incentives) have been implemented in recent years. These initiatives aim to maximise the quality of care, and to prevent fragmentation of health care services.

The PCSIP is an ARC funded project. It has strong support from the Adelaide Northern Division of General Practice and includes Barbara Magin, CEO of the Division, as a member of the steering committee. The project is investigating primary care-based initiatives used in the management of obesity, diabetes type 2 and depression in the northern metropolitan areas of Adelaide (Elizabeth and its surround). By analysing the long-term costs and benefits of these initiatives, the purpose of the PCSIP is to evaluate whether such Programs offer sufficient benefits to patients, considering costs to Practices, patients, and the health service associated with their implementation.

The general methodology of the project is to collect data on health and service usage for patients diagnosed with these conditions. This data will then be used to map care pathways for patients, and link the pathways to changes in intermediate measures of outcome (such as HbA1c levels for diabetes patients). From these intermediate measures we can extrapolate to long term outcomes and estimate the costs and benefits of the initiatives.

By identifying efficient ways to treat patients with obesity, diabetes type 2 and depression, the PCSIP will provide an improved understanding of the impact of primary care-based initiatives, which can, in turn, improve the quality of decision making around scarce resources and help avoid the implementation of comparatively inefficient interventions

Further details are available via the linked pages on the left-hand menu.