Quality, Equity and Systems Transformation in Primary Health Care (QUEST PHC): Project Report

In Australia as internationally, rising health costs and health inequity are major challenges. Strong primary health care systems are well evidenced to address both costs and equity of health outcomes. Australia is engaged in a number of initiatives aiming to improve the quality of primary health care and in particular general practice. At a regional level Primary Health Networks (PHNs) work with general practices to collect and monitor a range of data and a national process for data collection, storage and analysis is currently being planned. However, there is no consensus as to what defines high quality in general practice in this country. The Western Sydney PHN (WentWest) supports a number of practices engaged in practice transformation towards high quality models of care including Patient Centred Medical Home (PCMH) models. In partnership with the Department of General Practice at Western Sydney University, WentWest sought to develop an evidence based suite of indicators and measures of high quality general practice, utilising the data they obtain from their practices. Discussion with other Primary Health Networks revealed similar interests, so we partnered in the first instance with two other Primary Health Networks in our region (Nepean Blue Mountains and South Western Sydney) to test the face validity of the indicators and measures developed with WentWest. This report presents the research described above which was funded by WentWest and by the Ainsworth Foundation. We plan future content validation of the tool with a larger number of Primary Health Networks, aiming to build a model that will enable measurement of high quality general practice in the Australian context.