Helping solve an emerging crisis

13 December 2006

UNSW researchers have won two grants to help solve Australia’s medical workforce shortage.

The grants from the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute are each worth almost $200,000.

Nick Zwar, Professor of General Practice in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, is leading a team that will look at improving the way services are provided in primary care to older people.

“There are a number of factors at play,” said Professor Zwar. “We have an ageing population with increasing demand for more extensive and comprehensive care of chronic disease. Meanwhile, older Australians increasingly demand choice in services and how they are delivered.

“This is happening at the same time as the ageing of the primary health care workforce, changing work practices and workforce shortages,” he said. “There is a need to improve the alignment between the needs of older Australians and the skill-mix of the primary health care workforce. This project will identify these opportunities.”

Dr David Perkins from UNSW’s Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity will lead a team that will look at the place of generalism in mental health care in Australia and overseas.

“In rural mental health there are serious workforce shortages and we need to look at the roles of general staff who provide the vast majority of mental health care in Australia,” said Dr Perkins, who has recently completed research developing and evaluating a mental health care service delivery model in the Far West of NSW.

The Far West Mental Health Integration Project, which was started in 2000 and funded by federal and state governments, is centred around community-based mental health teams involving nurses, GPs, Aboriginal health workers and psychologists. It also involves recruiting visiting psychiatrists to support the local staff. There are teams in Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge, Bourke and Dareton.

“Regional areas typically don’t get their fair share of mental health funding, but this model reverses that,” said Dr Perkins, who led the evaluation of the trial.

“Psychiatrists are funded to visit on a monthly basis and stay for two or three days at a time,” said Dr Perkins. “That’s important because they are able to support the local staff, through training and supervision, while also assessing patients.

“Now people in these areas get to see a psychiatrist as quickly as you can in Sydney,” said Dr Perkins.

The research led by David Perkins and Nick Zwar is supported by a grant from the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.