The challenges
Throughout the evolution of Divisions of General Practice to Medicare Locals, and now Primary Health Networks, the support of general practice has remained a core function. The idea has always been that these organisations establish strong relationships with general practice with the goal of working together to sustainably build capacity and capability.
Practice support teams responsible for this task often deal with numerous practices each with different contexts and challenges. Practice support officers are often required to provide differentiated support to meet the needs of each practice. In a lot of PHNs, the funding and tools for this task do not match the scale of the work.
We know that behaviour change, and organisational transformation takes time and a lot of patience. We need time to understand each practice’s vision, the barriers and facilitators of change to get to that vision, and how best to guide teams on improvement methodology. This ‘high touch’ support is multifaceted and covers a broad range of general practice domains such as digital health, business and quality improvement. Of course, just when progress has been made, practice team members leave, and they often need to start again. Spread this across 50 practices, with limited time themselves, and we can see the challenge for practice support officers is immense.
How can we address these challenges?
We need a way to scale up the ‘high touch’ support that practice support teams provide. A tool that augments practice support teams and enables differentiated support more efficiently. A platform that provides general practices with self-serve support tailored to their context. And one that enables the Primary Health Networks to more strategically allocate their resources to the needs of practices.
Introducing Practice Catalyst
Introducing Practice Catalyst, our new service designed to help PHNs better engage with and understand general practice capacity and capability. By understanding specific practice needs, Practice Catalyst helps PHNs to tailor solutions effectively and allocate practice support effectively
Practice Catalyst collates common elements from various frameworks for primary care excellence into one tool. Using the tool, practice teams will be able to self-assess their business, workforce, resilience and improvement capabilities. Embedded within the Kaleidoscope platform, Practice Catalyst will automatically analyse the self-assessment to help PHNs and practice teams identify practice strengths and areas for growth. The tool will prioritise activities according to their impact on practice capability and embed these into a tailored action plan for practice teams and their PHN support officers. Each practice plan will be linked to localised resources, in conversation with the local PHN, to guide and reinforce improvement activities.
Relationships between the PHN and practice teams are important drivers of capacity building in each region. Practice Catalyst aims to augment those relationships by enabling PHN staff to engage meaningfully with primary care. The tool can be used as a centrepiece in practice transformation conversations and perform the administrative work underpinning long-term improvement.
What do we want it to do in the future?
We can see a clear future for Practice Catalyst. Our mission is to sustainably reinvest into the tool after its launch. There is potential to invest in new modules to deepen assessments or focus on emerging issues. There may also be opportunities to improve Practice Catalyst’s interoperability with data in existing systems to further reduce administrative burden.
We expect to launch Practice Catalyst very soon. In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about the tool, please reach out to us at lesh@rebbeck.com.
