As part of the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA), the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed that the Department of Health and Ageing, in partnership with the state and territory health departments and in collaboration with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, would develop a set of national key performance indicators (KPIs) for Indigenous specific primary health care services.
The Indigenous primary health care national key performance indicators (KPIs) will monitor, inform, and provide a direct line of sight between the activities of federal and state- and territory-funded services that provide primary health care to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and the COAG Closing the Gap targets, in particular the targets for life expectancy and child mortality.
The indicators will enable monitoring of the contribution of this part of the health system in achieving Closing the Gap targets. The KPIs are intended to:
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indicate the major health issues pertaining to the regular client population of Indigenous-specific primary health care services (especially those of maternal health, early childhood and the detection and prevention of chronic diseases)
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outline the extent to which government-funded Indigenous-specific primary health care services collect, record and review pertinent data on these issues, and
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reveal changes in health risks or outcomes that may be driven by the quality of care that government-funded services provide to their clients.
Initially the KPIs will provide measures of the extent to which various general indicators of individual health and health-related behaviours among the Indigenous population are being captured by a targeted small number of government-funded Indigenous-specific primary health care services.
It is anticipated that, over the next few years, both the level of detail explored by the KPIs and the number of health care services contributing to the KPIs will increase. Further indicators will also be added to the indicator set as new national data definitions are developed and incorporated into the Indigenous primary health care data set specification (IPHC DSS).
The population of interest in the KPIs is the regular client population of an OATSIH-funded primary health care service that is required to report against the Indigenous primary health care key performance indicators. A regular client is defined as a client who has an active medical record; that is, a client who attended the OATSIH-funded primary health care service at least 3 times in 2 years.