All of Primary Health Tasmania’s work, in one way or another, flows on to the Tasmanian community. Whether it’s by commissioning services, or working in partnership with local communities, we work together to improve the health and wellbeing of all Tasmanians.
One of the main ways we support the community is by commissioning services to improve the health of Tasmanians.
Commissioning involves understanding local priority issues and buying services to address those issues in the most effective and efficient way.
We have commissioned services throughout the state in areas including mental health, Aboriginal health, alcohol and other drug treatment, and rural primary health.
For more information about our commissioned services, go to Our Services Portal.
Some Primary Health Tasmania projects include working directly with local communities, and supporting community-led activities where appropriate. This includes collaborative projects to assess and shape health services in some local municipalities.
Scoping and planning local health services
Population health planning is a collaborative process whereby health (and non-health) sector stakeholders, government departments, consumers, and service delivery organisations work together to understand and address gaps, challenges and opportunities faced by local communities and populations. This collaborative planning aims to strengthen innovative and integrated health and social care services for communities to better address their needs.
Primary Health Tasmania, the Tasmanian Health Service, Health Consumers Tasmania and key community and system-level stakeholders have collaborated on projects in three local government areas (Tasman, Central Highlands and Huon Valley) and collectively identified the need for sustainable health care. This process has involved thorough community and workforce consultation to inform future planning for health services in these regions.
These communities are at different stages of this collaborative planning process.
Tasman: The Tasman Clinical Services Action Group (led by the Tasmanian Health Service and Primary Health Tasmania) and the Tasman Voice for Health (led by Health Consumers Tasmania) are working to support the implementation of initiatives and activities to support the community needs identified. Read more about this project here.
Central Highlands: Community engagement is ongoing, with healthcare providers (led by Primary Health Tasmania) and ‘kitchen table’ discussions (led by Health Consumers Tasmania) to understand the gaps, challenges and opportunities within the community health and social context to further inform the next steps of engagement.
Southern Huon Valley: Community engagement led by Primary Health Tasmania (with healthcare provider workshops) and Health Consumers Tasmania (with consumer kitchen table discussions) have been completed. Joint priorities from both healthcare providers and consumers have been acknowledged, so work can start on identifying and implementing activities to meet community needs.
Primary Health Tasmania supports FindHelpTas, a central, online directory of services that supports the health and wellbeing of Tasmanians and communities led by a partnership of Tasmanian community organisations, and supported by TasCOSS.
It includes more than 900 services listed on the FindHelpTas database, providing a great overview of regional health and social services across the state.
We have developed a number of resources to help consumers, including:
Primary Health Tasmania works with Carers Tasmania to support Tasmanian carers by raising awareness of online and in-person supports available to them.
This includes promoting the follow resources to primary health professionals:
A lot of our work to help Tasmanians happens behind the scenes. It involves working with other organisations and health professionals to make sure people can move smoothly between the services they need, and to make sure all the important information about their health and care follows them.
Activities we are involved in include:
We have used data from a range of sources to build a picture of the health of each local Tasmanian community, by local government area. These profiles include statistics on health risk factors and illness as well as a map of key health services available. They are useful resources for local communities in understanding the health profile of residents and planning services accordingly.
You can find your local community profile here.
For more information and resources, visit the For the community section.