Outpatients Co-design: Brisbane North PHN
Status: Completed December 2020
Client: Brisbane North Primary Health Network
Partners: Metro North Hospital and Health Service
Background
The impact of COVID-19 on specialist outpatient services in Metro North, along with the rapid transformation to virtual care and telehealth models, highlighted an opportunity for a new approach to the delivery of outpatient services across the region.
Metro North HHS, Brisbane North PHN and the Health Alliance, together with Beacon Strategies, undertook a consultation and co-design with general practitioners (GPs) across Brisbane North to help develop and sustain these new models of outpatient care.
Beacon Strategies was engaged to lead the design and delivery of the co-design process through a series of remote and innovative sessions.
Approach
Adopting the Discover-Define-Develop-Deliver design approach, our project team:
engaged closely with GPs as well as consumer and carer representatives and specialists from Metro North outpatient services
Mapped out current touchpoints and identified issues and pain points
explored solutions across the GP/specialist interface of information, advice, referral management and communication, shared care and broad system development
captured the findings and reported back to Metro North HHS and Brisbane North PHN with recommendations for future programs of work.
Outcomes
From the findings captured through initial engagement activities, four concepts for potential solutions or ‘programs of work’ were identified, including GP Advice Lines, improved bidirectional communication, shared care models and GP information.
The findings from this project were summarised and presented in a slide deck with four potential solutions or ‘programs of work’ identified.
Each of these potential solutions were further explored with stakeholders to identify the anticipated benefits, challenges, existing examples, design considerations/principles and recommended implementation steps for each potential solution outlined within the delivered report.
A number of project-level recommendations were then outlined in the report to consider the findings of the project, and plan and prioritise the potential solutions to be progressed for pilot implementation, with a focus on shared governance, sound project management principles, change management communication and performance monitoring and evaluation.