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 southern 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.
Consultation with service providers and consumers has occurred in each community to understand the gaps, challenges and opportunities within both health and social contexts. Working groups have been established and, with the support of Primary Health Tasmania and Health Consumers Tasmania, are working to implement initiatives and activities to address the needs identified within each community.
Details of these working groups is as follows.
Tasman: The Tasman Clinical Services Action Group (led by Primary Health Tasmania) and the Tasman Voice for Health (led by Health Consumers Tasmania). Read more about Tasman community activities here.
Central Highlands: The Central Highlands Working Group (led by Primary Health Tasmania) and the Health Action Team Central Highlands (HATCH).
Southern Huon Valley: The Integrated Care Clinical Action Group (led by Primary Health Tasmania) and the Huon Valley Voice for Health (supported by Health Consumers Tasmania).
The ‘Grown Your Own’ scholarship program
Through undertaking the population health planning process and working with both communities and system partners, it was identified that health workforce recruitment, retention and primary care access were key priorities in each area.
The ‘Grow Your Own’ scholarship program was developed by Primary Health Tasmania to offer financial support to residents of these areas to undertake health-related training or study throughout 2024.
Supporting local health workforce development and increasing the number of active primary healthcare professionals working in each region will support long-term aims of improving access to primary care for residents and supporting sustainable models of care into the future.
The scholarship program was a one-off, time-limited opportunity.
Innovative models of care
Primary Health Tasmania has received funding under the Australian Government’s Innovative Models of Care Program to implement innovative and integrated models of care across the Tasman, Central Highlands and southern Huon Valley.
This grant opportunity will build on regional and population health planning work in these communities. The collaborative process includes needs assessments and wide consultation with service providers, consumers, and system partners. This will help in understanding the gaps, challenges, and place-based solutions for each community.
Working across three regions enables a structured approach to the sharing of ideas and lessons learned.
All models use a multidisciplinary team leveraging off relationships between local primary healthcare providers to make best use of existing workforces. Private practitioners/business owners, salaried staff and large organisations will collaborate to deliver these models of care.
These models require multiple professions, sites, funding mechanisms and governance structures committing to new ways of working together. All organisations are committed to practising in culturally safe and responsive ways, further enhanced by co-designed and community-driven processes inclusive of representation from consumer groups and local health organisations such as Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations.
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.