Qualitative perspectives on the sustainability of sexual health continuous quality improvement in clinics serving remote Aboriginal communities in Australia.

Objectives: To examine barriers and facilitators to sustaining a sexual health continuous quality improvement (CQI) programme in clinics serving remote Aboriginal communities in Australia.

Design: Qualitative study.

Setting: Primary health care services serving remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, Australia.

Comparing and contrasting 'innovation platforms' with other forms of professional networks for strengthening primary healthcare systems for Indigenous Australians.

Efforts to strengthen health systems require the engagement of diverse, multidisciplinary stakeholder networks. Networks provide a forum for experimentation and knowledge creation, information exchange and the spread of good ideas and practice. They might be useful in addressing complex issues or 'wicked' problems, the solutions to which go beyond the control and scope of any one agency.

Development of a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cancer Framework: A Shared Process to Guide Effective Policy and Practice.

Indigenous Australians experience a substantially higher cancer mortality rate than non-Indigenous Australians. While cancer outcomes are improving for non-Indigenous Australians, they are worsening for Indigenous Australians. Reducing this disparity requires evidence-based and culturally-appropriate guidance.

The characteristics, implementation and effects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health promotion tools: a systematic literature search.

Background: Health promotion by and with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter Indigenous) Australians is critically important given a wide gap in health parity compared to other Australians. The development and implementation of step-by-step guides, instruments, packages, frameworks or resources has provided a feasible and low-resource strategy for strengthening evidence-informed health promotion practice. Yet there has been little assessment of where and how these tools are implemented or their effectiveness.

A systems-based partnership learning model for strengthening primary healthcare.

Background: Strengthening primary healthcare systems is vital to improving health outcomes and reducing inequity. However, there are few tools and models available in published literature showing how primary care system strengthening can be achieved on a large scale. Challenges to strengthening primary healthcare (PHC) systems include the dispersion, diversity and relative independence of primary care providers; the scope and complexity of PHC; limited infrastructure available to support population health approaches; and the generally poor and fragmented state of PHC information systems.

Evaluating the effectiveness of a multifaceted, multilevel continuous quality improvement program in primary health care: developing a realist theory of change.

Background: Variation in effectiveness of continuous quality improvement (CQI) interventions between services is commonly reported, but with little explanation of how contextual and other factors may interact to produce this variation. Therefore, there is scant information available on which policy makers can draw to inform effective implementation in different settings. In this paper, we explore how patterns of change in delivery of services may have been achieved in a diverse range of health centers participating in a wide-scale program to achieve improvements in quality of care for Indigenous Australians.