The COVID-19 global health crisis has significantly affected countries worldwide since the end of 2019. A well-coordinated vaccination program is essential to facing the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic and to minimising hospitalisation and death from COVID-19.
General practices are playing a significant role in the mass vaccine rollout in Australia. According to the Australian Government Department of Health data, as of 5 August 2021, 7,007,815 Commonwealth vaccine doses had been administered in the primary care setting.
Resources and coordination at the general practice level will be required to achieve the goal of vaccinating eligible Australians by the end of 2021. Continuous quality improvement (CQI) in running the COVID-19 vaccine program is vital to achieving this goal and ensuring efficiency, effectiveness, consumer satisfaction, fewer vaccine safety incidents and lower resource wastage with better planning.
Actively participating in South Western Sydney PHN’s (SWSPHN) Quality Improvement In Primary Care (QIPC) program enables general practices in our region to work on their COVID-19 vaccine program as a quality improvement activity, with simple and practical guidance provided by their Practice Support Officer or Health Systems Improvement Officer.
How can QIPC assist with the COVID-19 vaccine program?
The QIPC program aims to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care in general practice by identifying areas for improvement, assisting with goal setting, and providing progress reports and feedback based on practice-based data extraction.
POLAR, the clinical audit tool, helps to utilise practice data in a meaningful manner. In early 2021, POLAR developed a COVID-19 Vaccine Planning report which is available to all eligible practices in the region, and provides an opportunity for practices to plan their COVID-19 vaccine program more effectively and efficiently.
How to make use of the COVID-19 Vaccine Planning report
Selecting a suitable patient cohort to start the vaccination program can be challenging for many practices. The COVID-19 Vaccine Planning report gives practices a quick performance overview and the characteristic of the practice population. The report has two core functions:
- Patient cohort identification based on phases, age and chronic diseases
- Vaccination status tracing
It enables the practice to select and focus on those patients who can benefit the most from having the vaccine first or even to chase up a patient who has overdue vaccines.
Patient cohort identification
As seen from the screenshot above, the main interface provides an overview of how your practice is progressing in the vaccine program based on each age group. The active patient count shown on top represents active patients within your practice system; patients marked inactive are not being counted. The interaction on the left-hand side has clickable buttons that enable your practice to select the patient cohort you need; hover text clarifies what each button means.
If your practice would like to focus on a specific phase, vaccine status or age group, simply click on the button, “Active Patient Count” and the number of patients in the selected patient cohort will appear.
Vaccination status tracing
The above screenshot is one of the most useful pages in this report, located under the tab “Patient Phase Details”. It provides your practice with all the information you require to view a patient’s vaccination status. All the vaccination data is based on the information within your clinical software. To enhance the report’s accuracy, it is important to keep records up-to-date even if one of the vaccines is done elsewhere.
Each description on top of the table has a magnifying icon. By clicking on that, you can filter each item down to the patient cohort you want. Once all the required filters are applied, a patient list can be generated and exported to Excel.
Examples walkthrough:
Identify patients aged between 30 to 49 years old who have not had the COVID-19 vaccine ever
Additional information:
For a detailed explanation on this report, please refer to the POLAR webinar April 2021 and fast forward to 28:35 – 42:00 minutes, alternatively contact your support officer or email enquiries to HSIsupport@swsphn.com.au