Enhancing prevention in primary health care – Phase 2

What is the issue?

Primary health care has an important role in assessing, preventing and managing the most prevalent modifiable risk factors for chronic disease. Australia’s Primary Health Networks (PHNs) can play a role in developing partnerships with key stakeholders to commission and coordinate new preventive services and programs and to integrate clinical and population health approaches to chronic disease prevention.  It is not clear, however, what this looks like in practice.

How did the project address the issue?

Following the first phase of our research into strengthening the role of PHNs in prevention, this project aimed to identify what prevention approaches are feasible, working well, or could potentially work well, in primary health care.

The project identified a cardiovascular disease prevention initiative with PHNs and stakeholders, then trialed and evaluated this prevention initiative across several PHNs to determine feasibility of scaling up such an initiative across all PHNs in Australia.

What is the relevance for practice?

Through identifying the barriers to prevention approaches in primary care, such as practice facilitation (which has the potential to play a key role in primary care redesign), there is the potential to improve the coherence of the PHN efforts in reducing the burden of chronic disease in Australia and in using resources more effectively to better prevent and manage chronic disease.