Spotlight: Strathpine GP Super Clinic
At the Strathpine GP Super Clinic, students can experience working in a multidisciplinary team in a primary care setting.
Address: 11/328 Gympie Rd, Strathpine, QLD 4500
Telephone: (07) 3480 0111
Date opened: 11 January 2010
Website: http://www.strathpinesuperclinic.com.au/
GP Super Clinics – an important part of National Health Reform – are enabling university students to learn how to prevent and manage complex, chronic health problems through a multidisciplinary team approach to caring for patients.
The Strathpine and Gladstone GP Super Clinics and the Golden Beach Medical Centre are working together to provide training opportunities for Queensland University of Technology students, including nurses and midwives, nutritionists, exercise physiologists, pharmacists, podiatrists, psychologists, social workers, radiographers and medical laboratory scientists. The three-year program started in 2010.
A key focus of this training is teamwork in a primary care setting to assist patients to cope better with health and medical problems and related social and financial impacts. Students are encouraged to interact with a range of health practitioners and experience how many health professionals can work together to help patients and boost their care.
Students follow patients through their total care program, for example, they might spend some time with the pharmacist dispensing medications and also working alongside the dietician.
Karen, a social worker from Brisbane, has developed better networking skills with a wide range of health professionals during her training placement at the Strathpine GP Super Clinic. She has developed a deeper understanding of her colleagues’ professional perspectives and recognises the value in integrating medical and social approaches to holistically caring for patients.
“The whole team worked together recently to help a patient get emergency housing,” she said.
Karen contributes to the team’s efforts by supporting patients with life skills and self-esteem counselling services, assisting with referrals to welfare agencies to prevent homelessness and to assist with emergency food and money. She works closely with all of the clinic’s practitioners, especially the mental health nurse and the psychologist.
The Golden Beach Medical Centre is a large, established medical practice that will use the Primary Care Infrastructure Grant to upgrade and improve training facilities for students.
Golden Beach has a mainly elderly population, which provides an opportunity for students to participate in home health surveys. These assessments are proactively conducted for people over 75 years to assess their safety and nutrition and also to screen for depression and dementia.
The team-based training approach at the Strathpine and Gladstone GP Super Clinics and the Golden Beach Medical Centre, will enable students to implement other community-based early interventions through effective collaboration with a range of health practitioners. Such effective primary care can reduce hospital admissions and prevent emergencies.
Additional training hours will be provided by the three clinics for other health and medical students, including from the University of Queensland. Medical registrars are also able to do clinical placements.
More than 60 GP Super Clinics being built across Australia will help to address long-term challenges facing Australia’s health system, by preparing the workforce with multidisciplinary team training opportunities in primary care settings.
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