About the Medicare Local National Wave
Supporting Medicare Locals to embed Continuous Quality Improvement
The Improvement Foundation is now delivering comprehensive training that will give your Medicare Local team the skills to build continuous quality improvement (CQI) systems into all aspects of your organisation.
Through your involvement in this wave, you will benefit from networking and team building opportunities with staff from other Medicare Locals and sharing ideas and experiences with fellow professionals who are facing similar challenges.
For more information about this innovative new wave, click on the headings below:
What is the Medicare Local National Wave?
Working through a ‘real world’ problem
Developing a Quality Improvement Plan
Sharing ideas with other Medicare Locals
What is required of participating Medicare Locals?
What participants said about QUISP training
What is the Medicare Local National Wave?
This innovative wave provides a great opportunity for your Medicare Local to take part in:
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A comprehensive quality improvement training program
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Working with peers from other Medicare Locals
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Developing a quality improvement plan for your Medicare Local
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Engaging with local practices and health services.
The wave will include working through a ‘real world’ problem relevant to your Medicare Local. You’ll hear from experts in quality improvement, work towards embedding continuous quality improvement (CQI) skills and tools into your everyday work, and have ‘protected time’ to work with your team to problem solve, innovate and plan to implement changes.
Working through a ‘real world’ challenge
The Improvement Foundation (IF) will work with your team on a ‘real world’ challenge relevant to your organisation – you pick the specific area you would like to improve and we give you the skills to tackle it.
We’ll support your team to apply your new quality improvement (QI) skills to your specific challenge and then support you to embed your learnings by developing a Quality Improvement Plan (QIP). You can get the most out of working through your challenge by choosing an area that you think will directly relate to your QIP.
By participating in this wave, you’ll develop the skills to build capacity for QI into all aspects of your Medicare Local.
Developing a Quality Improvement Plan
During the activity periods of the Medicare Local National Wave, IF will support your
team to develop a QIP that engages your general practices and other health services and supports them to move towards best practice in the management and prevention of chronic disease.
Your QIP activity will include a Priority Workshop for your general practices and health services to attend. IF will support you with the design and implementation of this workshop. Some of the benefits you can expect to see through delivering a Priority Workshop include:
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Engaging your practices and health services
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Collecting data, benchmarking and displaying local results
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Assisting your practice and health service professionals to understand the value of measurement and the role of quality improvement in improving patient care
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Engaging health service professionals to identify local health needs and priorities
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Working with your health services to identify strategic solutions to local priorities
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Embedding CQI to address priority areas within your Medicare Local.
We’ll help you with the recruitment process by delivering a recruitment webinar and providing you with recruitment materials.
IF will make available an incentive payment of up to $4,000 for each practice or health service (to a pre-agreed total) who engages with your Medicare Local and participates in the QIP. We’ll work with Medicare Locals to develop and test a simple funding model which supports their general practices and health services to participate in your QIP.
IF will work with your Medicare Local to determine an appropriate financial incentive model for your QIP, and to determine exactly how many practices or health services will be funded to participate.
While participating general practices and health services will need to meet some specific milestones, there will also be flexibility for your Medicare Local to adapt elements of the financial payment in accordance with the design of your QIP.
When developing your incentive payment model, there will be some minimum requirements that need to be met, such as :
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Payment at sign up
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Regular submission of quality indicators
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Achieving agreed outcomes, including participation in quality improvement activities, such as a priority workshop.
Within this structured incentive model there is also flexibility for your Medicare Local to adapt elements of the financial payment in accordance with the design of your QIP. For example:
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Medicare Local A |
Medicare Local B |
Medicare Local C |
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Medicare Local A provides a $1500 sign up payment to participating health services, a further $1000 for regular submission of quality indicators and a final payment of $1500 for health services that meet agreed outcomes, such as participation in quality improvement workshops. |
Medicare Local B provides a sign up payment of $500, a further $1500 for regular submission of quality indicators and $2000 for health services that meet agreed outcomes. |
Medicare Local C provides a smaller overall incentive to each participating practice or health service. This enables Medicare Local C to engage with additional practices and health services within their region. |
Throughout this wave you’ll learn to use many simple yet highly effective QI tools and techniques to investigate, test and implement quality improvement ideas in your workplace, such as:
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The psychology of change
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Spread and sustainability of change
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Model for Improvement
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Analysing information and data
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Measuring improvement
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Process mapping
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Root cause analysis.
Sharing ideas with other Medicare Locals
This wave will bring your Medicare Local team together with colleagues from around Australia in an environment of peer-to-peer learning and sharing to promote innovation and ideas for improvement.
Your team will benefit from networking and team building opportunities with peers from other Medicare Locals, and sharing ideas and experiences with fellow professionals who are facing similar challenges.
Three of your lead staff members will attend an orientation session and participate in three face-to-face workshops over five months, with supported activity periods in between. Learning workshops (LW) will be held on the following dates:
- LW1 - 2 March 2012
- LW2 - 30 March 2012
- LW3 - 11 May 2012
This wave differs slightly from previous Australian Primary Care Collaboratives Program waves. Modelled on the highly effective QuISP (Quality Improvement Skills Program), some of the key differences include:
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This wave is only open to teams from 14 of the first tranche of 19 Medicare Locals
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Your team will participate in three face-to-face workshops over five months, with supported activity periods in between
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IF will deliver four virtual training webinars so you can involve more of your Medicare Local team in CQI
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Before the first workshop, IF will work with your Medicare Local team to identify a local priority that you would like to focus on throughout the wave. Using what you’ll learn at the workshops and with our support throughout, you can then apply your new skills to your unique local priority.
For more information about IF’s QuISP Program, visit the IF website: http://www.improve.org.au/our-work/quality-Improvement-skills-program/
If your team participates in the Medicare Local National Wave you can expect to benefit from:
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A flexible and supported approach to engage your organisation in CQI
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An increase in knowledge and skills within your team through the practical application of quality improvement approaches to real world problems
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Flexibility to bring your own local priorities for discussion at workshops. This will enable you to respond to primary care needs of immediate local importance
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The ability to respond to and implement change more effectively.
What is required of participating Medicare Locals?
There are some minimum requirements that participating Medicare Locals must meet:
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Three relevant staff members to attend and actively participate in orientation and all learning workshops. As each workshop builds on the work completed in the one prior, it’s important to have the same three team members attend all workshops
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Develop a QIP and engage your local general practices and health services in CQI
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Submit Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles
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Deliver a Priority Workshop
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Collect and submit data on a monthly basis.
IF will fund the costs of:
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Reasonable travel and accommodation for all participants to attend the Medicare Local National Wave workshops
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Agreed operational and other associated costs of delivering workshops
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Incentive payments for general practices and health services who participate in your QIP.
The ability to measure change and improvement is at the heart of the collaborative methodology. Measuring will help you identify opportunities for improvement, and you can track where your change efforts are getting results.
Through IF’s secure online web portal, participating Medicare Locals will be able to:
Benchmark your Medicare Local and your general practices and health services
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Use feedback graphs to identify areas for improvement
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Track the results of your improvement work using feedback graphs.
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To read more about measures, the web portal and how the measures are submitted to the web portal click here.
Any Medicare Local, practice and health service data that is submitted by you is aggregated to protect your privacy and then made available to you each month on the IF secure web portal.
Places are limited. Register your interest by completing an expression of interest (EOI) form and faxing it to IF on (08) 8231 6690.
To download the EOI form click here.
If you are unable to download the form contact IF at enquiries@improve.org.au or phone (08) 8422 7400.
Registrations Close Friday 27 January 2012
We will contact you by Tuesday 31st January to confirm your registration and discuss an orientation time.
What participants said about QUISP
“This Program has given our team the tools to help us identify improvement opportunities and the skills to be able to generate change and evaluate the process.”
“The tools we learnt about during QuISP can be easily applied to other areas of our work, and other departments within our organisation.”
“Thanks to our involvement in QuISP we now have the skills to plan more effectively, identify risks, and ensure our goals are achieved!”
“At QuISP our team learnt how to identify priorities and then make changes in small, bite sized, chunks. We now focus on our successes!”
An organisation wanted to improve overall efficiency by educating all staff to follow a consistent process of data cleaning, creating, editing, filing and archiving electronic documentation. By applying tools learnt at QuISP, understanding of the structure of the network drive increased from 62% to 100% and confidence in applying the new process when using the network rose from 0 to 89%.
An organisation wanted to increase the uptake of a Lifestyle Modification Program (LMP). By applying quality improvement tools learnt at QuISP the team identified a significant increase (100%) in the uptake of the LMP. In addition to this the Division identified improved teamwork and improved external relationships as other benefits experienced through applying the skills and tools learnt at QuISP.
Last Updated 15 February 2012