We believe in continuous quality improvement in healthcare to deliver the best possible outcomes for your patients. Quality Improvement (QI) is an essential process for general practices to refine care systems, assess patient outcomes, and ensure ongoing healthcare excellence.
Our goal is to equip you with the right tools, knowledge, and support to implement effective QI strategies tailored to your practice’s needs.
Our Practice Development Team provides practical guidance and tailored support to help implement QI strategies within your practice.
Quality Improvement is a structured, systematic approach aimed at enhancing the quality, safety, and effectiveness of healthcare services. Through planning, assurance, and ongoing management, QI ensures continuous advancements in patient care. This approach helps you, as a healthcare provider, evaluate your systems, processes, and structures to improve health outcomes and the patient experience.
Quality improvement follows four key stages:
Making quality improvements to a practice’s structures, systems and clinical care that are based on the practice’s information and data will lead to improvements in patient safety and care.
Our Practice Development team’s engagement with a practice’s safety and quality systems is essential to streamlining the implementation of quality improvement activities.
WNSW PHN provides resources, training and support to assist general practices with Quality Improvement, including:
For personalised assistance and guidance, connect with our Practice Development Team.
The Practice Incentives Program (PIP) QI Incentive rewards practices for participating in continuous quality improvement activities in partnership with their local Primary Health Network (PHN).
Practices may focus their quality improvement activities on specified improvement measures. There are no set targets for the improvement measures.
Alternatively, practices can choose to focus their activities on other areas. These areas must be informed by their clinical information system data and meet the needs of their patients.
By participating in the QI Incentive, practices will:
Bodenheimer’s 10 Building Blocks for Primary Care offer a practical approach and underpins the success of high-performing practices. A person-centred approach is key to ensuring that health outcomes are improved by placing patients, families, and carers at the centre of care delivery. This is because ultimately, it is the values, resources and actions of the person and their carers that are the key determinants of health outcomes.
Every community has differing characteristics and it is ideal for a practice to identify its patient population, particularly if it has a high number coming from priority and diverse populations. These populations might include:
Ensuring vulnerable patients are identified and treated equitably is important for identifying disease early and for better health outcomes.
Explore our full range of Quality Improvement resources and tools that can assist you in implementing quality improvement initiatives in your practice.
For further information or support, reach out to the WNSW PHN Practice Development Team.
