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What is Bridge to Better Health?

The Bridge to Better Health project is dedicated to enhancing the health care experience for patients with intellectual disability by boosting the capacity of practice nurses to implement annual health assessments in primary care settings.

Why are we doing this project?

Preventable deaths

People with intellectual disability experience a mortality rate of up to 26 years earlier than the general population. This is often due to preventable causes, and barriers to care.

Barriers to care

Barriers to accessing care include such things as: short consultation times, service eligibility, service usability, communication skills, diagnostic overshadowing and more.

Time limitations

Since the introduction of an annual health assessment as an MBS item, general practitioners have reported lacking the time required to complete them effectively.

Lack of education

Nurses and medical staff receive minimal if ant education about supporting patients with intellectual disability in their training. This can lead to a lack of confidence supporting patients with intellectual disability.

What are we trying to change?

We are trying to see if our intervention shows:

An increase in preventative health actions

We hope to show that the number of preventataive health actions, like immunisations and health screening, increased in the practices that received our intervention.

A decrease in potentially avoidable hospitalisations

We aim to reduce the number of times people with intellectual disability go to hospital for reasons that could have been avoided if identified earlier (e.g. Pneumonia or nutritional deficiencies).

Value for money

We will compare health outcomes and health economy outcomes to see if having practice nurses do more of the health assessment will be cost-effective.

Improved knowledge and confidence of practice staff

We are hoping to improve the knowledge, confidence and attitudes of practice staff towards patients with intellectual disability.

How do we plan to do this?

We will randomise practices into the intervention group and the usual care group.

Practices in the intervention group will receive for one year:

Access to a specialist intellectual disability nurse

Practice nurses and general practices who are receiving the intervention will have access to a specialist intellectual disability nurse. This nurse will provide direct support via monthly check ins and support the facilitation of an annual health assessment.

Access to education modules

Online education has been specifically developed in conjunction with health professionals, experts in the field and people with lived experience of intellectual disability. The content will aim to fill any gaps in knowledge for practice nurses and other practice staff about providing effective health care to patients with intellectual disability. This education can count towards CPD.

Access to online resources

Online resources have been curated from international and national sources into an accessible, and easy to manage website page. This webpage will save practice nurses time in searching for appropriate resources.

Practices in the usual care group will operate like normal for one year and then be offered the intervention