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Health service improvements in New South Wales

26 June 2006

Three members of the UCL Centre for Health Informatics & Multiprofessional Education (CHIME) have been appointed to help improve public health services in New South Wales, Australia.

Professor Paul Bate, Dr Glenn Robert and Dr Henry Potts will act as international partners to the local evaluation of the state government's Clinical Services Redesign Program (CSRP).

Under the CSRP, which is costing A$70m over three years, external experts (PA Consulting, PWC, KPMG and Accenture) are providing process redesign and change management skills to clinical redesign units in each of New South Wales's eight Area Health Services.

The programme is being evaluated locally by the Centre for Health Services Development (CHSD) based at the University of Wollongong, led by Professor Kathy Eagar. The local evaluation will be both normative and summative and will explore five particular issues:

  • Is the programme being delivered on budget and on time?
  • Are the redesign projects proving successful?
  • What is working where and why?
  • Is New South Wales establishing the culture and systems that will make gains sustainable?
  • How can the impact of the programme be increased?

The role of UCL CHIME's experts as international evaluation partners is to provide high-level strategic input to the CHSD evaluation, to advise on evaluation structure and interpretation of data, and to contribute to potential future strategies for the implementation of the programme over the next three years.

Dr Robert said: "The CRSP in New South Wales is one of the most ambitious ongoing performance and quality improvement efforts in healthcare, and one that is seeking to apply many of the lessons learnt in the NHS over the last five years as to how to implement, spread and sustain change in a healthcare system. The CHIME team is looking forward to working with the CHSD team at the University of Wollongong to ensure that the evaluation of the CRSP is both rigorous and of value to the future development of the programme itself."

Professor Bate added: "It's a privilege to be invited to participate in this ambitious and exciting programme to transform New South Wales's health services. The programme is already showing some promising early results, and we hope our experiences of similar large-scale change projects in the UK will help those involved to achieve further successes. The added bonus is the partnership between UCL and the local research evaluation team at the University of Wollongong, an international collaboration that opens up many opportunities for both of our institutions in the future."