West Moreton Health is leveraging a proven global healthcare model to help improve health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people in remote communities.
Dr Paul White, Senior Psychiatrist with the Statewide Mental Health and Intellectual Disability Service, leads West Moreton Health’s multi-disciplinary Project ECHO team, which includes an expert panel of nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists.
Around the world, Project ECHO is a learning partnership model that uses video conferencing to bring interprofessional leads including medical specialists from a range of disciplines together to form panels that support regional and frontline healthcare providers to discuss specific cases.
Dr White said the current West Moreton Health project is focused on supporting people with intellectual disability and from vulnerable and marginalised backgrounds to navigate complex mainstream and mental health systems.
“We do a lot of work in the small Indigenous communities across the state,” Dr White said.
“We will be using the globally established strategies of Project ECHO to link to GPs and other health providers on the ground, particularly in remote and hard-to-access places.”
This first Project ECHO assignment for West Moreton Health would focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander consumers and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
West Moreton Health Chief Medical Officer Dr Deepak Doshi said future Project ECHO ventures would bring West Moreton Health and the Darling Downs West Moreton PHN together in a learning partnership.
“Now that we have a direct dialogue with primary healthcare providers, we can help them to become more self-sufficient in diagnosing and treating patients, and they can share their unique insights with us,” Dr Doshi said.
Children’s Health Queensland’s Project ECHO Superhub Program Manager, Perrin Moss, said the model was ideal for a health service such as West Moreton, which had a large geographic footprint and many specialist services.
“So, depending on what West Moreton’s strategic and workforce objectives are, where you have a groundswell of need across many communities, you can use the ECHO model to reduce gaps and build capacity,” Mr Moss said.
“The most important part is that this model is the interprofessional and interactive learning. Teams are empowered to engage in discussion and hands-on support for real-life cases that build capacity on the frontline.”
Mr Moss said Project ECHO’s model was a cost-effective way of managing patient-centred care in remote locations through common videoconferencing platforms.
The convenience of being treated closer to home by frontline providers who participate in ECHO sessions also means patients are more likely to adhere to their treatment regimen knowing there are other experts helping to inform their care planning to effect better health outcomes, he said.
The model has also been successfully trialled by Apunipima Cape York Health Council in Far North Queensland, where internet network coverage is poor with success.