Professor Vasi Naganathan
Health and Social Policy (Aged Care Unit) at the Ministry of Health and the Agency for Clinical Innovation (Aged Health Network) will provide an opportunity for sharing ideas, strategies, local solutions and concerns with respect to COVID-19 pandemic preparedness.
The Aged Care/Aged Health community of practice has three streams:
The community of practice will be multidisciplinary and include representation from all districts and networks. It will enable clinicians, clinical managers, and program managers in aged care and aged health from all districts to provide expert advice and guidance to the system, and to escalate matters that require a statewide or system response.
The aim of these sessions is to:
Health and Social Policy will escalate issues raised by the community of practice to Strategic Reform and Planning. Key information will be collected and sent to MOH-COVID19-ClinicalAdvice@health.nsw.gov.au, which will be monitored by the Strategic Reform and Planning.
Collated issues/advice will be escalated by Ms Willcox through to the Public Health Emergency Operations Centre (PHEOC) and/or the State Health Emergency Operations Centre (SHEOC) as appropriate.
PHEOC and SHEOC responses will be provided to Strategic Reform and Planning and then to the community of practice Secretariat(s).
Weekly community of practice updates will be provided to NSW Health Chief Executives.
Each community of practice will have a clinical/policy lead appointed by Deb Willcox, Deputy Secretary, Health System Strategy and Resources.
A group which is able to endorse statewide changes or make decisions that impacts a unit or system, or allocate funding to recommendations.
This community of practice is open to all key district contacts of aged care services, as well as contacts from other relevant services who will be invited to specific streams, as required. As a minimum it will include representation from all relevant districts and networks. Membership may be extended more broadly to include all interested NSW Health staff.
To join the Aged Health/Aged Care Community of Practice, participants should email MOH-COVID-19AgedCareCOP@health.nsw.gov.au and indicate which stream they’d like to join.
Members of each community of practice stream includes:
From July 2020 all stream meetings will merge into one monthly meeting on 1st Tuesday from 9:30am – 10:30am.
Meetings will be virtual. Details will be attached to the calendar invite.
Members can raise COVID-19 issues by emailing the stream lead before the next meeting via MOH-COVID-19AgedCareCOP@health.nsw.gov.au. For urgent issues that are not emailed prior to the meeting, members can raise them during the meeting.
Email subject line to include the COP name, stream number, if it’s an issue or question and the member’s organisation. For example:
Members should include the following in the email
Existing communication mechanisms remain for all issues not related to COVID-19.
