ProCare Mission Smokefree success - Health Excellence Awards

ProCare Mission Smokefree success at Health Excellence Awards

ProCare’s Mission Smokefree last night won the Auckland District Health Board’s Healthcare Excellence award for Excellence in Community Health and Wellbeing.

While the campaign’s goal was to encourage smokers to quit through providing brief advice and connecting them with services to help them achieve this, ProCare Clinical Director Dr John Cameron says the push was not just about a short-term win: ‘The motivation was the chance to make a real difference to the health and wellbeing of our communities. Practices had to make conscious effort to improve the rate and they did this because they could see the clinical benefits to their patients.’

Dr Cameron said the measure of success was to exceed the Ministry of Health’s target and demonstrate a change of culture in practices to provide brief advice and document the decline in numbers of recorded smokers enrolled with practices.

ProCare’s performance for the Better Help for Smokers to Quit national health target (NHT) was 103% at 30 June 2014 (105% for high needs), considerably surpassing the MoH’s 90% target. ProCare moved from 29th to 2nd in the PHO league table and ADHB was recognised as the second best DHB for this NHT, as well as one of only two DHBs in the country to achieve all six targets (the other was Counties Manukau Health where ProCare represents at least half of all patients).

Steve Boomert, ProCare CEO, says the network was able to achieve this success only through the collaborative efforts of practices, the ProCare team, DHBs and NGOs, such as Quitline.

‘The work was largely done by practice teams with logistic support and clinical leadership from ProCare. What’s even more exciting is that the commitment and processes needed to achieve all the clinically-led targets are becoming business as usual for practices. They’re not just recording smoking status but actively looking at how we can increase the non-smoking rate in our population, better manage our patients with diabetes, as well as preventative health, such as immunisation.

‘Our goal is to broaden ministry targets by making them more relevant to our practices and our population. Bottom line, we’re showing the power primary care can bring to population health.’

Mission Smokefree: how the ProCare network got there
• Increased our brief advice intervention rate by 120%. Providing an additional 16,250 brief advice intervention (29,888 total)
• Supported an estimated 1170 smokers quit in Auckland, decreasing the number of smokers in our ADHB practices to 29,480 from 30,650 and our project continues this year to achieve even greater numbers
• Increased referrals to cessation providers; quantified by Quitline numbers from 9 referrals in July 2013 to a high of 338 in May 2014
• 100 additional clinicians registered as QuitCard providers (increasing smokers access to subsidised Nicotine Replacement Therapy)
• 50 practices engaged with regular smoking cessation health promotion activity for the community
• 200 clinicians attending Mission Smokefree education events throughout the year
• 93% of our enrolled population have their smoking status recorded from 81%

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ENDS

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