Health Roundtable Innovation Award recognises Southern’s primary community programmes
Providing more help to patients with long-term conditions and supporting older persons to remain in their own homes, when that is the right place for them to be, has earned Southern health providers a top industry honour.
WellSouth, primary health network, and Southern DHB together have earned Health Roundtable’s 2018 Whole of Health System Innovation Award, for their work to improve support to frail elderly patients and people with complex health needs.
The Southern team’s submission was chosen from among 10 health agencies around the country. It highlighted CLIC a new long-term conditions programme for primary care, a falls and fractures prevention initiative and the new ‘Home Team’ programme that works to bring allied health, rehab and other supports to the community or in people’s homes. The overall aim of the group of programmes is to help reduce hospitalisation, patient re-admissions and moves to residential care.
“This award is peer-selected and recognises innovation in patient care and managing demand for services,” says Wendy Findlay, WellSouth Director of Nursing who received the award with colleagues in Wellington recently.
“There were many excellent initiatives presented, so this is a real endorsement of the work we are doing here to provide better support for people with complex health needs, helping them receive more care in the primary and community setting or even in their own homes, and, ultimately, reducing the need to for secondary care and hospital visits.”, says Dr Hywel Lloyd, Medical Director, Primary Community and Strategy Directorate, Southern DHB.
Recognition of these programmes will help further enhance collaboration and innovation across the health sector: “We’ll continue to evaluate outcomes and we expect these measures will contribute to fewer acute hospital admissions, emergency presentations, and will have a substantive impact on helping patients with chronic conditions, like heart disease, diabetes and COPD.”
Health Roundtable was established in 1995 as a forum for sharing experiences and expertise among health care administrators and clinicians across Australia and New Zealand, as well as top innovators from the UK, USA, and Canada. Its Whole of System Improvement Group works to improve the delivery of health care across all health care services – secondary, primary and community-based care - especially where the community and hospital settings intersect.