Mental Health
The National Primary Care Mental Health Collaborative (NPCMHC) assisted primary care providers to develop their capability to deliver rapid, sustainable and systematic improvements in the care they provide to adults of working age with common mental health disorders, through a sound understanding and effective application of quality improvement methods, tools, techniques and skills
Key points
- the NPCMHC program aimed to improve the primary care of adults of working age with common mental health disorders.
- it's aim was to establish systems to maximise management of service users closer to home.
- it involved 19 Primary Care Trust sites with multidisciplinary improvement teams (including service users).
- the program was supported by the Department of Health, National Institute for Mental Health, Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and a range of other stakeholders.
Achievements
After 12 months of the program significant improvements were noted, including:
- reductions in GP consultations
- fewer referrals to the community mental health team and/or consultant psychiatrist, and
- an increase in the number of people with a common mental health disorder returning to work.
Last Updated 27 October 2011
What is the Model for Improvement?
The Model for Improvement provides a framework for developing, testing and implementing changes. It helps to break down a change effort into small, manageable chunks which are then tested to ensure that things are improving and that no effort is wasted. It is always worth remembering that while every improvement is certainly a change, every change is not an improvement.
The Model for Improvement consists of two equal parts; the first part, the “thinking part”, consists of three fundamental questions to guide improvement work:
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- How will we know that a change is an improvement?
- What changes can we make that will result in an improvement?
For more information about the Model for Improvement visit: http://apcc.org.au/about_the_APCC/the_model_for_improvement/
What is a Collaborative program?
A Collaborative is an improvement method that relies on the distribution and adaptation of existing knowledge to multiple settings, to achieve a common aim. Healthcare Collaboratives are built on a tried and tested method, developed in the USA , which has been applied to a wide range of management challenges. It was originally applied to healthcare systems by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in the USA, and has been adopted in other countries. A Collaborative is not a research project, a set of conferences or a passive exercise. A Collaborative is about actually doing and improving.
What is the Collaborative Methodology?
Adapted from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement’s Breakthrough Series Collaborative methodology, in the Australian context, the Collaborative methodology is used as a framework for the APCC Program. This methodology has been applied to a wide range of management challenges. Originally applied to healthcare systems in the USA, it has since been adopted in other countries, including the UK, Scotland, Canada and New Zealand.
The Collaborative methodology is proven to be highly effective in achieving large scale systems change and demonstrating measurable outcomes. It provides a generic quality improvement model that can be applied to achieve incremental, rapid and locally relevant improvements across a broad range of clinical and practice business issues.