Doctors Kamo achieve National Healthcare Home Certifcation

Doctors Kamo achieve National Healthcare Home Certifcation

Doctors Kamo are one of ten practices nationally to receive National Healthcare Home Certification, and the first practice in Northland.

The Healthcare Home Model of Care enables primary care to deliver a better patient and staff experience, improved quality of care and greater efficiency.

“I was really keen to get involved right from the outset,” noted Dr Jan Widdowson.

“Managing acute load and demand has made a big difference, telephone triage is a really useful thing, patients really appreciate getting a call from us and it helps prioritise our workload which has really reduced the stress on the team.”

The Neighbourhood Healthcare Homes (NHH) programme is a collaborative programme between Northland DHB and the Northland Primary Health Organisations (PHOs).

The National Healthcare Home Collaborative includes a number of PHOs and DHBs across New Zealand who are supporting practices to implement the Healthcare Home Model of Care.

Certification recognises that The Doctors Kamo have achieved a national standard in implementing their plan across all Healthcare Home Domains (Urgent and Unplanned Care; Proactive Planned Care; Routine and Preventative Care; Business Efficiency).

The healthcare home concept recognises that most people have a general practice that they see as their natural health place, or ‘home’ and that it is well placed to coordinate and link people up with other services that they need.

In order for general practice to fulfill this role well, they need to consider new ways of using technology and their staff to provide better, coordinated services to their patients.

“We need champions in our community, GP’s like Jan Widdowson who can lead the neighbourhood healthcare home change in our community,” acknowledged Manaia Health PHO chief executive Donovan Clarke.

“I acknowledge the team at Doctors Kamo for their achievement in achieving Certification, especially for being the first practice in Manaia Health PHO to do so.”

“Because we are now seeing the right people at the right time rather than whoever happens to phone first, we have more control over our service and it is certainly less stressful which benefits everyone.”

The NHH Programme is implementing the new model of care in 10 practices across Northland.

These practices serve more than 50 percent of Northland’s enrolled population.
An expression of interest has been released to identify further practices, who the change team will begin working with from July 2018.

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