Background

For many years the health of the Aboriginal population has been significantly below the average for all Australians. Of principal concern is the fact that Aboriginal people have considerably shorter life expectancy than other Australians. Aboriginal people also suffer from reduced health outcomes across all age groups and tend to face considerably more chronic illness.

A major step towards Closing the Gap in health outcomes for Aboriginal people is to first establish a baseline on current Aboriginal health outcomes, particularly in remote Australia. In 1999 the Northern Territory Aboriginal Health Forum (NTAHF) identified the need for a common set of key performance indicators (KPIs) in Aboriginal primary care in order to establish this baseline.

The NTAHF undertook a project to further develop KPIs measuring Aboriginal health outcomes in such areas as chronic disease, antenatal care, babies, child health and adult health. This project identified 44 aboriginal health KPIs and agreed to initially implement 19 of these.

The Dept Health & Families (DHF) with agreement from the NTAHF has developed a system to facilitate the management and reporting of the NT jurisdiction set of Aboriginal health KPIs (AHKPIs) for all remote and urban Aboriginal primary health care services. In December 2008 the NTAHF endorsed the final version of the agreed NT AHKPIs (Version 1.3.1)

The NTAHF support for this work represents a unique and significant breakthrough in collaborative decision making, unparalleled in other Australian jurisdictions.

Conceptual Design of the NT AHKPI Information System

Use of KPIs

For the first time the NTAHF will be able to present a NT wide view of health outcomes in urban and remote Aboriginal primary health care throughout the Northern Territory. This information will be fed back to communities through published reports and will streamline and simplify primary health care reporting requirements at both a Territory and Commonwealth level.

This evidence will be used to show trends in individual and population Aboriginal health outcomes and inform improvements in planning and policy development.

Clinical information is currently being collected from a mixture of DHF data sources such as the Primary Care Information System as well as a mixture of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations' Patient Information Recall Systems (PIRS) such as Communicare and Ferret.

The published NT AHKPI reports will be provided to each Aboriginal Medical Service with comparisons on each health community result against the overall NT results. This baseline information will be crucial in assessing and improving Aboriginal health outcomes as well as assisting the further development of future indicators and providing information towards developing an NT wide model of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI).

Evidence based outcomes with inform Aboriginal Health Forum planning and assist with the review of the Expanded Health Service Delivery Initiative as well as a basis for the NT CQI model.

A technical working group will review reporting and feedback to services from a clinical / PIRS perspective.

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