Collaboratives

The Australian Primary Care Collaboratives (APCC) program is an initiative funded by the Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA) to support general practice in the delivery of systematic and sustainable solutions to improve the quality of primary care to patients. It focuses on three areas: the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease, diabetes and patient access to primary care services. Collaboratives is about team building, monitoring and enhancing processes, problem solving and continual improvement.

The program has been rolled out nationally in two phases and a succession of waves, each building on the experience of the previous one. The SouthEast Primary HealthCare Network has a total network involvement of twenty-three practices.

The network’s practices have been highly successful in achieving significant, sustained and on-going improvements in their operations and the delivery of enhanced primary care to their patients. Collaboratives uses a data extraction tool which empowers practices to identify and make the necessary changes to improve the quality of their data, patient management and outcomes.