Capturing the ‘how to’ of implementing a new model of care in rural NSW

Description

An exciting community-focused initiative between the Western NSW Primary Health Network and Charles Sturt University is assisting people living with neurological conditions including Parkinson’s in the western NSW region to access specialist medical services and is providing scholarships for movement disorder specialist nursing care. The program includes sites as far as Broken Hill in the west of NSW, Coonamble in the north, and east to Bathurst and Mudgee.

The pilot study described in the media report below provides an exciting opportunity to translate the findings from a series of commissioned research projects undertaken between 2017-2019  into a series of diverse real-world contexts.  This is important because traditional evaluations focus on outcomes without understanding how pilot projects can be implemented or how they operate in diverse rural settings. Given the human resources, time and money invested in a pilot study such as this, careful and thorough outcome evaluation is important, but it is also essential to understand the complex factors and diverse settings in which the pilot projects operate. Our work is significant because it really does capture the ‘how to’ of implementing a new model of care in rural NSW and the factors that will enable it to be sustained and implemented in other rural settings.