This project is funded by the 2023 MRFF Primary Health Care Research Grant. In this project, we will undertake fundamental research to understand the optimal health workforce mix, incorporating the preferences of consumers and healthcare providers and identifying better ways to incentivise team care.

The recently released Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report identifies four key objectives to enhance primary health care delivery in Australia. This includes a system where co-ordinated multidisciplinary teams work to their full scope of practice to provide quality person-centred continuity of care. However, several structural barriers exist that prevent health care professionals from working to their full scope of practice and in a more coordinated way including practice location, business models, funding models that disincentivise teamwork, and inter-professional tensions.

We therefore need to identify strategies that overcome such constraints, to understand what mix of primary care workforce produces the best population health outcomes given limited resources. Defining team composition is not straight forward in this context as it varies with the needs of the patient/consumer as well as the availability of health workforce with the required skills, availability and willingness to meet that health care need. Foundational work understanding the population health care needs, current workforce availability and efficiency is required, alongside consideration of practitioner regulation, health care practitioner preferences and patient/consumer preferences. There have been few examples of large-scale trials to better coordinate primary care in Australia, resulting in a lack of evidence available to policy makers.

To address this issue, we have created a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, health workforce researchers, health economists and specialist behavioural economists to undertake a body of work to bridge the knowledge gap. We are joined by our partners, ACT and Queensland Health, as well as ACT and Queensland consumer groups.

The impact of our research will be to inform future policy initiatives that improve the efficiency and retention of the health workforce, enhance person-centred care and maximise population health outcomes.

Funding

This project is funded by a $2.8 million Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Primary Health Care Research Grant from 2024 to 2027.