Implementing Indigenous community control in health care: lessons from Canada.

Conclusions We conclude that although the Canadian experience is based on a different context, the processes and tools created to implement community control in Canada can help inform the Australian context.What is known about the topic? Although Australia has promoted Indigenous control over primary healthcare (PHC) services, implementation remains incomplete. Enduring barriers to the transfer of PHC services to community control have not been addressed in the largely sporadic attention to this challenge to date, despite significant recent efforts in some jurisdictions.What does this paper add? The Canadian experience indicates that transferring PHC from government to community ownership requires sustained commitment, adequate resourcing of the change process and the development of a meaningful accountability framework tailored to the sector.What are the implications for practitioners? Policy makers in Australia will need to attend to reform in contractual arrangements (towards pooled or bundled funding), adopt a long-term vision for transfer and find ways to harmonise the roles of federal and state governments. The arrangements achieved in some communities in the Australian Coordinated Care Trials (and still in place) provide a model. PMID: 26553422 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research