• Home
• Indigenous Chronic
  Disease Package
• Tackling Chronic Disease
  Risk Factors
  • National action to reduce Indigenous smoking rate
  • Helping Indigenous Australians to reduce their risk of chronic disease
  • Local Indigenous community campaigns to promote better health
• Improving Chronic Disease
  Management and Follow up
  • Subsidising PBS medicine co-payments
  • Higher utilisation costs for MBS and PBS
  • Supporting primary care providers to coordinate chronic disease management
  • Improving Indigenous participation in health care through chronic disease self management
  • Increasing specialist and allied health follow up care
  • Monitoring and evaluation
• Workforce Expansion,
  Training and Support
  • Workforce education and training
  • Expanding the outreach and service capacity of Indigenous health services
  • Engaging Medicare Locals to improve Indigenous Access to mainstream primary care
  • Attracting more people to work in Indigenous Health
  • Clinical practice and decision support

Monitoring and evaluation

What the Australian Government is doing

The Government is committed to improving chronic disease outcomes for Indigenous peoples and will monitor and evaluate its contribution to the National Partnership Agreement on Closing the Gap in Indigenous health outcomes.

How this will work

The Government will fund a number of related elements that will work together to monitor implementation and assess the Indigenous Chronic Disease Package’s effectiveness in achieving the Closing the Gap targets.
The elements are:

• the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework to guide the package’s monitoring and evaluation activities;
• monitoring up to 32 sentinel sites to provide information about implementation and early outcomes;
• introducing a web-based system for Indigenous health services to use in reporting data;
• use of national survey information;
• ongoing analysis and reporting by the Department of Health and Ageing including, for example, analysis of MBS and PBS data; and
• an overall evaluation of the package to be undertaken in 2012-13. Back to Top

How this will help Indigenous Australians

• Monitoring and early evaluation of the program through sentinel sites, as well as national survey and other information will help determine how well the package is achieving its objectives of:
  • reducing chronic disease risk factors such as smoking, poor nutrition and lack of physical activity;
  • identifying chronic disease as early as possible;
  • providing effective treatment and ongoing management of chronic disease; and
  • building the workforce and the primary health care system’s capacity to more effectively address chronic disease in the Indigenous population.
• The overall evaluation will draw on data from the other measure elements and will demonstrate progress towards closing the life expectancy gap.

Who will implement the new approach

• The Department of Health and Ageing is developing the monitoring and evaluation framework in 2009-10.
• The Department will roll out the sentinel sites in 2010 and they will operate until the end of 2012.
• The Department will roll out to service providers a web-based reporting system over a three year period, based on the reporting tool used by the Healthy for Life program. Indigenous-specific primary health care services will report on key performance indicator (KPI) data through this system. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare will act as national data custodian.
• The Department is assisting in the development of an enhanced Australian Health Survey to collect data on key risk factors such as nutrition, physical activity, obesity and sugar levels.

Indigenous Chronic Disease Package Monitoring and Evaluation Framework

• The Department has developed the Indigenous Chronic Disease Package Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.

Indigenous Chronic Disease Package Sentinel Sites Project

Menzies School of Health Research has been engaged to establish and manage the ICDP Sentinel Sites Project over almost 3 years, from March 2010 to January 2013.

The Sentinel Sites Project is providing place-based feedback on how the ICDP is working. It is identifying barriers and enablers and early outcomes concerning the implementation of the ICDP and will inform the final National Monitoring and Evaluation Project. Twenty Four sentinel sites have been established across Australia in metropolitan, regional and remote locations.

Information to inform the evaluation is collected via health provider interviews (including the use of surveys), community focus group feedback and health service clinical indicator collations. Back to Top

Indigenous Chronic Disease Package (ICDP) National Monitoring and Evaluation Project

An overall national evaluation of the ICDP in 2012-13 is a key element of the ICDP evaluation strategy. ICDP Monitoring and Evaluation Framework identified the need for national annual monitoring to assess the implementation progress phase and early impact of the ICDP.

The department has engaged KPMG together with Winangali, Ipsos Social Research Institute and Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, to undertake the national monitoring and evaluation of the ICDP. The project includes a range of consultations with stakeholders and communities through interviews, regional forums and community site visits.

KPMG has also been undertaking opportunistic consultations by using events (networking conferences, workshops, meetings) that bring together ICDP workforce, organisations or stakeholders. Prearranged events provide an opportunity to access stakeholders who may otherwise be difficult to reach and also reduce consultation burden on the stakeholders.

To provide information about any upcoming event or seek further information on the evaluation project, please contact
Naomi Bromley,
Project Manager, KPMG Australia
147 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia
Phone: 03 9838 4601
Fax +61 3 9288 6666
Email: nbromley@kpmg.com.au

Back to Top

Page currency, Latest update: 12 March, 2013

• Useful links
• Contact us
• Copyright
• Linking to this site
• Disclaimer
• Privacy
• Accessibility