Extended Primary Care
Extended Primary Care (EPC) aims to support practices to manage acutely unwell patients, to reduce ED and hospital usage and to support equity of access for priority populations.
It is a new programme funded by Te Whatu Ora across the five Te Waipounamu (South Island) PHOs outside of Canterbury.
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Extended Primary Care will offer practices the opportunity to manage a wider range of acute conditions.
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It also recognises the care and time required of rural practices to hold a patient awaiting ambulance transfer to hospital.
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Thus, this funding will also allow rural practices the ability to claim for their time and interventions when stabilising a patient ahead of transport to hospital.
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It is based on providing a package of care to the patient rather than our specific intervention-based claiming now.
General practice will be familiar with our current suite of Primary Options for Acute Care (POAC) programmes. EPC will build on the programmes already included in this suite. As a result, WellSouth is now moving away from using POAC as a name and you will hear Extended Primary Care or EPC instead.
The fundamental change this programme brings is that it recognises and funds the time taken to provide acute care in general practice, as an alternative to referring someone to hospital.
Programme details
Claims will be done in the WellSouth portal.
The programme information sheet will be uploaded here when the programme goes live.
Once we transition to this programme the following current claiming options will be removed from the portal:
• IV antibiotics
• IV fluids
• Urinary Catheterisation
• COPD ambulance diversion
Some existing programmes under POAC will remain in the portal under a new heading of Planned Care:
• IV iron infusion
• IV Zolendronate
Training
During July and August we held a series of webinars. If you missed these, you can view one of these here.
We will also schedule visits with practices across in September and October to support the rollout of Extended Primary Care.
Keep up to date via our Clinical Director Updates.
Funding
Te Whatu Ora has provided new funding for this programme, with confirmed funding for this financial year. We anticipate demand for this programme may exceed available funding, therefore we are allocating funds at practice level. Each practice’s initial allocation is based on enrolled population, augmented by weighting for priority patient groups (Māori, Pacific, Community Service Card holders) under 14’s and over 65’s, and weighting for rural and very rural practices.
Every practice will be allocated more funding than they have claimed for through the existing acute care POAC services last financial year. Each practice will be able to decide which patients in which situations they want to use the funding for. As this is a brand new programme, we will review trends in usage and may rebalance the allocations after the programme has been running for 5 months.