The project was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council and supported by partner organisation James Cook University.
This project is now complete.
The project took a systems wide approach, planning, implementing and evaluating action to address health workforce through a number of objectives:
- Engaging community members, health service managers or boards, and partner organisations in designing and implementing ground-up approaches to strengthen systems for enhanced continuity of health care and trusting relationships.
- Building equitable systems for local skills-based training and development to increase and sustain the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in a service.
- Using community-led planning and capacity development of the non-Indigenous health workforce to improve patterns of turnover and strengthen community trust in health systems.
- Exploring optimal strategies for strengthening the equity of governance and education systems for the PHC workforce, including professional training and development to ensure effectiveness of local strategies.
- Learning from these locally implemented processes to facilitate scale out/up to a broader range of settings.
We worked in partnership with services and a range of key sector partners. We drew on existing primary health care implementation frameworks to develop a culturally-centred and strengths-based process framework that considered the key domains of successful Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary health care models (such as cultural embeddedness and genuine engagement, etc.). We used this to co-design (with community and key stakeholders) workforce strategies to strengthen competency and stability. We then trialled and adapted these strategies in three implementation sites, representing a range of geographical contexts and governance models. We designed the project following Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander priorities for research quality and measured outcomes including staff turnover, number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, community usage, community rating of safety, trust and respect with the service, and cost benefit.
