Primary Care Summit 2024 Wrap-up

It’s been three days of rich, pragmatic, and ambitious discussion on navigating the barriers, enablers, and key mechanisms for realising a vision for amplifying the integral role that primary care plays in supporting us to focus on individual and population health and wellness.

What is clear is the transformational opportunity we have to reinvigorate the policy, strategic, funding, digital and data, and human-centred approaches to shifting the national health landscape to a system that supports health and wellness instead of just servicing sickness.

Some significant reflections and learnings I have are:

• The desire amongst the General Practice and PHN community to drive and inform change, in partnership with policymakers, to re-centre approaches to and enablers of care around a core humanity and the relationships between clinicians and patients - to shift from transactional care that rewards activity over improvements to approaches which measure experiences and outcomes.
• That strengthening Medicare is at its core an opportunity to integrate people, systems, and funding to achieve meaningful outcomes and bring joy back to general practice.
• That there is a clear need to address the space between patient care interactions with their GP’s - a space for which existing funding arrangements are not compatible with. In reality, by leveraging a multidisciplinary teams approach that reflects patient needs and utilising blended funding models, there is within that space between an opportunity to strengthen proactive and preventative health and wellbeing support and keep people in the community and out of high cost, carbon intensive, and often traumatic hospital admissions.

Some key reflections specific to how we most meaningfully leverage practicing partnerships with lived-experience and use data to drive decision-making are:

1. That value often defines the communities we gravitate towards. Those communities inform and shape culture. Culture drives practice, processes, partnerships, data - and most importantly our appetite for diverse and collaboratively informed change.
2. When we collaborate to clarify and align our values, and are flexible in our approaches - informed by practicing partnerships with lived-experience - we can meaningfully design and fund for impact.
3. That one immediately actionable step we can take tomorrow, at the level of care interactions between patients and their doctor, is to shift our language and conversation from a focus on asking “what’s the matter with you?” to “what matters to you?”
4. That we have a wealth in waiting of patients eager to provide patient reported outcomes measures (PREM's) and patient reported experience measures (PROM's) that we can, and should, be harnessing at a practitioner, practice, and systems level to benchmark care impact and support a shift to value based care.

There is so much more that was discussed and so generously shared, so I encourage you to keep your eyes open as other attendees and contributing organisations release their own (no doubt comprehensive) syntheses of key themes that will fuel what I’m confident is a core reform narrative in our national effort to design and build an inclusive, equitable, sustainable, enduring, and impactful health and well-being system.