Rural Remote Health
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Rural Remote Health · Jul 2006
Educating to improve population health outcomes in chronic disease: an innovative workforce initiative across remote, rural and Indigenous communities in northern Australia.
Like Indigenous populations in other countries, an epidemic of chronic disease has swept across Australia's Indigenous communities in the past decade. The Northern Territory and Queensland health departments initiated preventable chronic disease strategies in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Yet finding innovative ways to translate this to the health workforce was challenging. Through support from the Australian Government, three universities, two health departments and two Indigenous organisations worked in partnership to improve workforce capacity in remote and rural communities through innovative education. ⋯ A practical curriculum framework now exists to integrate a population health approach for the prevention and early detection of chronic disease when educating the primary healthcare workforce. It is relevant to all health disciplines and is flexible in that it can be adapted, or adopted, depending on the educational needs of the disciplinary group. It is being imbedded into numerous undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional development programs in Australia. It includes: the core learning outcomes expected of any workforce, resources, and a self-assessment tool in chronic disease. These tools are assisting educators in the required paradigm shift required of the workforce to alter the single disease based practice model towards a comprehensive and integrated population based approach required for the workforce in the 21st century.
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Rural Remote Health · Jul 2006
Comparative StudyConsultations in general practice and at an Aboriginal community controlled health service: do they differ?
Despite the widely acknowledged health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, little is known about consultations in primary care with Indigenous people. In particular, the nature of consultations in the Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service (ACCHS) sector has been rarely studied. Data collection about consultations in primary care has been steadily improving, with good quality data now available on an ongoing basis about patient demographics, risk factors and consultation content in private general practice. This study aimed to characterise consultations at Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Health Service (TAIHS) in terms of patient demographics and consultation content. These could then be compared with existing datasets for local consultations in mainstream general practice and from a geographically distant ACCHS. ⋯ The greater number of problems managed per consultation in ACCHS, compared with Indigenous patients in mainstream general practice, supports the assertion that ACCHS fill an important role in the health system by providing care for their largely Indigenous patients with complex care needs. The Medicare system as it was structured at the time did not encourage involvement of Indigenous health workers in provision of primary medical care. It remains to be seen whether introduction of the new enhanced primary care Medicare numbers will assist in this process. These findings have implications for ACCHS in other areas of the country and for other providers of primary health care for Indigenous Australians.