Is it all just about ramping? Intermediate Care and The Healthy Collective

The connection between The Healthy Collective and Intermediate Care

The Healthy Collective is a collaboration of primary care practitioners and social enterprises with a vision to improve the lives of citizens and the sustainability of services in communities.

Intermediate Care is identified as a mechanism to bridge the gap between primary care and acute care, address the many challenges facing our health system, and provide better health outcomes in a collaborative and cost-effective way.

The Healthy Collective is motivated to identify, act and respond to intermediate care opportunities in collaboration with our member practitioners, local, state and federal government, and partnered care providers and corporates.

In doing so, we believe there is significant potential to deliver better health outcomes and satisfaction for individuals, reduce the strain on hospitals and public services, improve the sustainability of the health system and maintain a commercially vibrant, innovative and community-engaged private sector.

Our health system is facing significant challenges

Health system challenges are well recognised and there is no simple solution. Continuing to provide services the same way we have always done will not be able to meet these needs long term in a cost-effective way.

The current system is not sustainable. Our population is growing and getting older with more complex health needs, yet our resources are already stretched. Currently in South Australia, 18% of our population is aged 65 or over, yet they account for 24% of all emergency department presentations.

Acute care hospitals and emergency departments are at capacity, are centrally located and are not ideal places for rehabilitation or management of chronic conditions. In SA, approximately 44% of emergency presentations are categorised as semi-urgent or non-urgent, and only one third of presentations lead to a hospital admission.

Primary care practitioners offer services and support for individual people when they are stable however the workforce is not coordinated or resourced to provide more intensive levels of care during times of instability.

Intermediate Care offers a sustainable solution for the health system

Intermediate Care aims to avoid unnecessary hospital admission and maintain independence by providing people with access to a higher level of clinical care in their community when a crisis occurs (step up) and by enabling earlier discharge from hospital through a supported re-ablement program (step down).

It requires an integrated healthcare workforce, involving collaboration between disciplines and across care sectors.

Care can be provided in a person’s own home, in community clinics, in existing care homes, or in purpose built intermediate care facilities.

The Healthy Collective: Models for Intermediate Care

The Healthy Collective mission is to build a healthy community by achieving more equitable access to consistent, transparent, and holistic healthcare options.

The Healthy Collective supports health professionals to improve their practices and facilitates inter-disciplinary synergies under a single point of governance to optimise patient outcomes and value in primary care, aged care, disability and more.

The Healthy Collective models for Intermediate Care have been enabled with the creation of:

1. Healthy Practitioner Network – A workforce of primary care practitioners, clinics and pharmacies that are committed to working collaboratively to improve health outcomes for people in their community.
2. Healthy Care Services – Governance for service delivery enabled by agreed practice standards, shared platforms for care provision (including digital), mobile clinical teams and a central unit for contract management and practitioner support.

With these two missing ingredients in primary care we can now offer new models to deliver better intermediate care solutions in same-day or overnight stay scenarios. We aim to do so by upskilling and resourcing existing infrastructure and services or by creating new facilities purpose built for intermediate care by enabling public and private partnerships and investment.

Interested and want to know more?

We would love to talk to you. We know that sustainable, holistic healthcare provision is hard, and while we represent practitioners who are doing their best, we don’t have all the answers without broader collaboration. We are very interested to speak with all stakeholders to understand current issues and explore opportunities for collaborative and novel primary care solutions including Intermediate Care.

Areas of interest for us include:

• Enhanced delivery of care within aged care facilities by investigating ways to improve rooms and medical facilities in aged care sites to better handle step up and step down scenarios under an advanced medical, nursing and pharmacy model.
• Converting existing infrastructure such a shopping centres and hotels into intermediate care hubs, accommodation with care options and priority care centres.
• Upskilling existing primary care practices to provide intermediate care functions for their local community.
• Engaging with state and federal governments and other funders to explore the breadth of opportunities and support the design of new models for sustainable healthcare in order to shape future tenders and private partnerships.

Contact us here.