What is a preventative health action?

A preventative health action is something that when completed, will prevent further health issues. We hope that by having practice nurses support more of the health assessment, more of these will be noticed and recorded.

  • A hearing test
  • An eye test
  • Referalls to other services

We will be seeing if patients who had screenings/follow-ups noted in their health assessment later had them completed. Often they are forgotten about, leading to worse complications.

How will we see if there was an increase?

Compare medical records

We will get consent from patients to have access to their medical records 1 year before and 1 year after the intervention. We will then compare if they had any new concerns identified, or actioned in since the intervention. We will specifically look at hearing tests as this is commonly missed in people with intellectual disability.

Preventative health actions

A list of preventative health actions was developed from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Quality and Improvement measures. We will use this list to compare before and after the intervention. It will show if there has been an increase in diagnosis/recognition of health concerns.

Health Assessment

We will gather whether a health assessment was performed from medical records at the general practice. This will also let us know if the actions recorded were fulfilled 1 year post health assessment.