Strengthening primary health care in Australia

Australia has a fragmented set of primary and community health services that can be difficult for patients to navigate. Attempts at planning across governments and facilities are limited, making it difficult to design robust patient pathways from primary care to hospital, and back into the community. As the evidence suggests that the number of people suffering from one or more chronic diseases will increase, it will be critical for primary health care services to adapt to models of health care delivery that require co-ordination across several health professionals. Alongside this, efforts to improve the ability of patients to be more proactive about managing their health and avoiding serious health conditions could be implemented. To achieve such a transformation to higher quality primary health care services, reform will be needed to the blunt mechanisms by which doctors are paid today. Accompanying this ought to be the collection of wellselected data that allows general practitioners to be benchmarked against their peers, to assess the quality of the services they provide.