The Greater Metropolitan Clinical Taskforce

The Greater Metropolitan Clinical Taskforce has been established to promote clinician and consumer involvement in planning and health service delivery.

We are a relatively autonomous organisation working actively with Area Health Services and reporting to the NSW Minister for Health and to the NSW Department of Health via the Deputy Director General and the Director General.

Our ongoing commitment to improving health care in NSW is based upon the principles of clinical governance with a focus on:

• Developing services based on clinical need
• Quality of care and safety for patients
• Equity of access and equity of outcome within the Hospital System
• Clinician / Consumer driven planning

Through the twenty clinical networks chaired by clinicians and involving doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, scientists, managers, and consumers we identify how and where improvements can be made in the particular specialty and implement these changes in association with NSW Health and the Area Health Services.

These networks have annual recurrent funding with a full time or part time Network Manager. Some of the Networks are well established, having received funding from as early as 2002, and employ a number of staff to carry out the objectives of the Network.

The clinical networks achievements are numerous and significant, and have:

• Brought together clinicians from facilities across the greater metropolitan region and beyond to identify the key issues in that specialty
• Established working groups to develop consensus documents to guide next steps
• Developed collaborative approaches - eg. standardised assessment and treatment protocols, models of care, benchmarks for services
• Shared staffing and resources across facilities to improve patient access
• Utilised consumers to keep thinking patient-focussed
• Provided staff training in various forms - conferences, seminars, webcasts, study groups and courses in conjunction with tertiary education institutions, opportunities to work in other facilities etc.
• Introduced uniform data collection systems to provide clinicians with data to guide changes in practice
• Facilitated clinical research and the dissemination of results
• Developed patient resources such as booklets, websites, directories, fact sheets, DVDs etc. to ensure that patients and their carers have a good understanding of the issues they face at diagnosis, during treatment and afterwards.

More Information can be found by following the links on the right to the specific clinical networks as well as by following the links below.