What's On News March 2018 Clinical Prioritisation Criteria go-live—updated Mater referral guidelines

News

Clinical Prioritisation Criteria go-live—updated Mater referral guidelines

Friday 2 March 2018

Revised referral guidelines for publicly funded specialist outpatient services commenced implementation from 1 March 2018. 

These guidelines were reviewed by Mater clinicians through the General Practice Liaison Program to consolidate Mater guidelines with the state-wide standardised Clinical Prioritisation Criteria (CPC) to ensure safe and equitable access to care.

What’s changing?

• Mater Online referral guidelines pages will be updated and complemented by communication to our referring practitioners alerting the GP community of the expected changes
• Mater referral management workflows and supporting tools have been redesigned to support the new categorisation processes and all staff affected  will be supported with training in the new tasks
• Enhancements have been built into IT systems to start to code referrals and capture information previously unavailable. This  allows better communication between clinicians, more mature service planning, improvement work and capacity building

Why the change?

Best practice referral guidelines as clinical decision support tools are designed to improve the quality of referral and the consistency of categorisation. 

Clear social modifiers within the tools allow for clinical override by GPs or specialists where this is appropriate. Reducing variability allows for better expectations of care for referring practitioners and patients at the time of referral and safer transition across community and hospital settings. 

Applying referral guidelines has shown to support patient access to care in the most appropriate place for the care journey. 

Impacts also include reduced long waits, more optimised hospital appointments and improved communication between specialists and GPs.