Collaborative care: Primary health workforce and service delivery in Western New South Wales-A case study.

Objective: To explore how four small towns in rural New South Wales known as the 4Ts are addressing challenges accessing quality care and sustainable health services through a collaborative approach to workforce planning using the collaborative care framework.

Design: Descriptive case study approach.

Setting: The collaborative care project was developed as a result of ongoing partnerships between 2 rural Local Health Districts, 2 Primary Health Networks and a non-governmental health workforce organisation.

Capability ... what's in a word? Rural Doctors Network of New South Wales Australia is shifting to focus on the capability of rural health professionals.

Rural health services, and the workforces that provide those services, are under unprecedented pressure due to insufficient health workforce numbers and distribution of health workforce weighted to urban areas. This creates health service access issues in rural areas, compounding existing health inequalities between rural and urban people. Many approaches to date have aimed to rectify these issues, with moderate success.

Hypothesis: improving literacy about health workforce will improve rural health workforce recruitment, retention and capability.

Background: One of the key barriers to health in rural areas is health workforce. Poor understanding and communication about health workforce across all stakeholder groups (including the broad community) is very common and can negatively affect the health workforce, recruitment, experiences and outcomes.

Hypothesis: In this paper, we propose the concept of literacy about health workforce.