Primary & Community Care

What does really good health care look like?

At its heart, our Primary and Community Strategy is about ensuring health care services are connected and appropriate to people's needs. And it starts with helping people look after themselves – supporting healthy living and overall wellness, enabling more preventative and planned care - as well as delivering medical services where and when it’s best to do so – whether that is in a person’s home, at a GP’s practice, in a community setting, like a pharmacy, or in hospital.

We want to get the best out of our health system so that the health professional providing the care may also change. We have a tremendous health care resources here in the district which we should make the most of  – nurse practitioners and midwives, general practitioners and hospital based specialists, physiotherapists and pharmacists, social workers and community support workers – we can do better with what we have and the strategy facilitates health professionals to work at the top of their scope.

Our strategy and action plans spell out changes that will better integrate hospital and community-based care, offer more technology-based solutions, including using telehealth for video consultations and encourages the uptake of ‘patient portals’ (Manage My Health, for example), so that patients can see results, renew prescriptions, book appointments – and, ultimately, be more actively engaged in their own health care.