Care Plus: an Overview

Summary

Care Plus is a new initiative as part of the Primary Health Care Strategy. It provides additional funding for primary health organisations (PHOs) to give better care to people who use high levels of care or have high needs because of chronic conditions or terminal illness. With Care Plus, patients receive expanded, better-coordinated, lower-cost services from a range of health professionals.

Care Plus aims are:

• improved management of chronic conditions
• reduced inequalities
• improved teamwork within PHOs
• lower-cost services for high-need primary health users.

Eligible patients are high-health users or have chronic conditions that need ‘intensive clinical management’. These patients will usually be managed in the practice by a team of health professionals.

All PHOs will offer Care Plus services once they have completed a preparatory phase and their detailed business plans have been approved by the DHB.

This publication explains Care Plus in more detail, how it was developed and contains a summary of the experiences of three PHOs which trialled Care Plus: HealthWest PHO in West Auckland, (Waitemata DHB), Tihewa Mauriora PHO in Kaikohe (Northland PHO) and Canterbury Community PHO (Canterbury DHB).