Better Sooner More Convenient Primary Care - New Zealand Doctor

5.5 Enablers
A key aspect of this business case is greater integration of services. Currently, medical centres
on the one hand, and community nursing and allied health and mental health on the other,
operate as mostly separate, parallel systems, even though their respective patient cohorts
overlap significantly. This separateness is underpinned and exacerbated by several structural
factors - the various sets of services use different, unconnected information management
systems (and for different purposes), are housed in multiple, separate buildings, and are owned
& operated by various different entities with very different drivers and constraints. This
project envisages changes in each of these three areas (information technology, facilities,
organisational structures) as key enablers of change.
5.5.1 Future facilities
Renovated or new facilities will be a key enabler of better integration of services in many parts
of the West Coast region. This business case entails two smaller and two larger facility
projects.
The first smaller project is in Greymouth, Grey District, where a proto-IFHC is emerging in the
form of Greymouth Medical Centre's rural primary health training facility. This 'academic
practice' is to be located on the Greymouth Hospital site next to the Emergency Department
(ED). In it, health professionals (and health professionals in training) will work across the
primary practice and the ED. This practice will be operational from 1 July '10.
The second smaller project is in Franz Josef in South Westland, Westland District, where a
joint DHB/St Johns Ambulance facility on St Johns' land is proposed. This facility is larger
than the four other clinics in South Westland, and is likely to become the hub of the South
Westland practice.
The first of the larger projects is in Westport, Buller District, where existing medical centre
and hospital facilities, though located on the same site, are widely dispersed and in various
states of poor repair. The aim is to build a brand new, substantive IFHC, to replace the existing
medical centre and hospital buildings, as the hub of IFHC services district wide for the
foreseeable future. This facility is likely to be a 2011/12 project.
The final project, and the largest and most complex, is the substantive IFHC proposed for
Greymouth. It will subsume/replace the proto-IFHC described above, and is envisaged to bring
the three Greymouth medical centres, various other private providers and the DHB's community
nursing, allied health and community mental health services all together into a single integrated
facility. The IFHC could possibly be located on the Greymouth Hospital site, and even be
physically connected to it. This project, if built on hospital land, would need to dovetail with
the proposed redevelopment of Grey Base Hospital - from which arises some of the complexity
of this project.
Business case EoI V38 AC 25Feb10 Page 35