Massey University head of the School of Nursing Professor Nicolette Sheridan.
Professor Nicolette Sheridan, of Ngāpuhi descent, will describe ways of organising general practice that are associated with good outcomes for patients, particularly for Māori and Pacific peoples, in what will be the final public lecture in Massey University’s Health by Design series.
Currently, the Government spends more than $900 million a year subsidising primary health services, but Professor Sheridan says there is limited information regarding quality, utilisation and outcomes of primary care services making it difficult to systematically improve primary care across the country.
In 2018 Professor Sheridan was awarded $1.3 million from the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the Ministry of Health to lead a study investigating the effectiveness of different models of primary care. The research team includes senior academics from collaborating universities - Auckland, Otago, Cambridge (UK) and the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) - together with experts from Sapere Research Group, DataCraft Analytics, and other experts including GPs, nurses, a nurse practitioner, a public health physician, an academic consumer researcher, health service researchers, and Māori and Pacific doctors.
“The traditional model of primary care has general practitioners and nurses operating as small businesses to deliver health care,” Professor Sheridan says. “Increasing pressures on the traditional model has come from factors that include an ageing, multi-ethnic and medically complex population; an ageing workforce; changing expectations of new graduate doctors and nurses and greater demands for accountability of health professionals.
Responses to these pressures have included corporate models of care delivery, with an emphasis on business management and processes that lower patient fees and increase access to care; and health care homes, with an emphasis on better use of doctor and nurse time, team-based care – mainly with nurses, pharmacists and doctors, and alternatives to face-to-face consultations, such as email and video.”
Data for the study is coming from existing national data collections, from Primary Health Organisations, and from interviews with general practice staff and patients, making it the largest collection of data on primary care in New Zealand.
The study findings are already showing considerable variation in all aspects of primary care, such as practice ownership, size, range of health professionals employed and links with social services. “There are differences in preventive care and patterns of prescribing such as for pain-killers and antidepressants,” Professor Sheridan says. “There are differences in outcomes such as rates of children being admitted to hospital with conditions that can often be managed in primary care. Some variation will be for good reason because patients have different health risks and health needs. We are interested to explore this variation because we think it will point us to practices that have found better ways to organise their services.”
Professor Sheridan, is a research professor, and was recently appointed as head of the School of Nursing at Massey University. She is a registered nurse with more than 25 years’ experience in clinical practice, research and education. Her research interests include healthcare consumers’ experiences of long-term conditions, and investigating disparities in primary health care services between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens, and Pacific and non-Pacific citizens as a means of monitoring government commitment to indigenous rights and equity in health care.
Event details
Time: 5.30pm networking, drinks and nibbles. Event concludes approximately 7 pm
Date: November 5
Location: Flax and Fern room, Block 9, Level B, Student Centre, Massey University Wellington campus
Click here to register.