The Challenge
Bendigo Community Health Services provides much needed primary and community health services to improve the lives of people experiencing disadvantage, many with complex health challenges.
As it celebrated 50 years of operation, BCHS faced several competing challenges. These included senior leadership changes, immediate staffing and skills gaps, the redevelopment of its main site and related staffing redeployment to other sites, and the need for a clinical governance, skills and capability audit.
BCHS offers the community GP services for general health matters, and GP services in specialist areas such as families and children, mental health, alcohol and other drugs, sexual health, men’s and women’s health, LGBTIQ health, and refugee health. Complementary allied health programs support people living with chronic conditions such as diabetes, respiratory or heart disease.
Our Approach
Larter Consulting, with its proud history supporting non-profit health services, was appointed to assist this transition. The initial focus was retention of the GP workforce, followed by streamlining remuneration, enhancing team and business culture, and ensuring the highest standards of clinical governance to ensure best practice for the community.
Larter took the following steps:
- Meeting GPs either remotely or in-person, spending time on the ground to comprehensively understand the issues from their perspective.
- Mentoring senior staff through face to face support, and providing strategic advice and recommendations.
- Reviewing pay structures, accreditation and clinical governance requirements throughout the organisation with the aim of ensuring best practice.
The Outcomes
Larter and BCHS achieved the following:
- Retention of the general practice workforce, in particular all existing GPs.
- Recruiting senior staff, providing certainty about the sustainability of general practice services and avoiding potential skills gaps.
- Establishing a Clinical Governance Committee reporting to the Board, and assisting the appointment of Board Directors with clinical governance and health backgrounds and expertise.
- Agreeing to a fairer and more equitable remuneration and employment scheme for GPs, meeting their specific needs while also providing greater certainty for BCHS with long-term staff retention and recruitment anticipated.
- Implementing an improved rostering system to ensure support for nursing staff on site across the service, with accreditation compliance and clinical governance strengthened.
- Mentoring support of the new practice manager for the general practice, including a focus on securing general practice accreditation.
- Sustainability of general practice services through the optimisation of appropriate billing of the MBS (Medicare Benefits Schedule) and enabling a multidisciplinary model of care supporting each clinician and maximising their effectiveness.
Feedback from BCHS has been overwhelmingly positive. In their words:
“Larter brought comfort to our service. They had a team of experts to guide us during what for us were challenging times for the business.
They genuinely cared for our people and the importance of a community led service that supports some of the most complex care needed in our region, that keeps patients out of the acute hospital system.
Larter made such a difference in a short time and did so in an ethical, caring, and cost-effective way.”
Bendigo Community Health Services is in a strong position to better serve the local community and has begun its next 50 years with confidence.
Contact us to explore how Larter can help your organisation to provide sustainable, high quality services for the benefit of the community.