Primary Health Networks are mandated to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health services for people, particularly those at risk of poor health outcomes. They are also mandated to improve the coordination of health services, and increase access and quality support for people in their local region [1].
The challenge is that to make serious improvements in population level health outcomes, deliberate attention needs to be paid to the social determinants of health. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), these are:
“ … the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life … the lower the socioeconomic position, the worse the health” [2].
It is tempting to say "but we are not able to deliver social care, we are a health services provider". My question is, can we get creative and innovative to achieve the mandate?
Can we hold hands with social care providers and the community to solve this challenge?
I believe we can. There are good examples of how we can do this [3]. System change will occur, when we, those on the ground and holding the potential for change, influence funders through the hard-to-resist argument that when we do connect up health and social, the return on investment is substantially better than current ways of funding and delivery of services.
And here is the opportunity: in connecting up both health and social care, Primary Health Networks are able to deliver what communities have always wanted - non-siloed, cost-effective, co-designed and safe services that keep people well, healthy and out of hospitals.
References
1. Australian Government. What Primary Health Networks are. 2021 [cited 2023 13 January]; Available from: https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/phn/what-PHNs-are.
2. World Health Organisation. Social determinants of health. 2023; Available from: https://www.who.int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health#tab=tab_1.
3. National Academies of Sciences, E. and Medicine, Integrating social care into the delivery of health care: Moving upstream to improve the nation's health. 2019.