Health services

The Health Services Integration Program

The Health Services Integration Program will work closely with health services and agencies to support their staff in routinely providing brief smoking cessation interventions. We will work closely with service managers whose staff members are registered in the 2010-2011 SmokeCheck training workshop program. In this way, we seek to assist services to prepare their service for supporting staff members to apply new skills attained through SmokeCheck training in their healthcare contacts with Indigenous clients. Our SmokeCheck Health Services Integration Program will be developed and implemented during 2009-2011.

Our activities will include working collaboratively with and supporting services to:

• introduce improved recording systems to gather information about the smoking status of all Indigenous health clients;
• improve access to advice, referral and information for health professionals and their Indigenous health clients about quitting and methods for quitting; and
• design and implement procedures that will encourage and assist local services (mainstream and community controlled) to make the SmokeCheck brief intervention part of regular health care practice.

We will continue to update this page as the Health Services Integration program is developed.

Health Services Integration project update August 2010

Over the past few months the Health Services Integration (HSI) project has been visiting and talking to many of our colleagues around NSW about how we can better support our trained health workers to use the SmokeCheck brief intervention in routine practice with Aboriginal clients. A hands-on guide is now being developed as a result of these discussions. A group of managers and senior clinicians have been invited to review and provide advice to SmokeCheck as this guide is developed. As well, all managers of staff participating in SmokeCheck workshops are receiving information about how they can support their staff member to put the brief intervention for smoking cessation training into practice.
The HSI project will also be working with four sites around NSW to test this guide and to design service-specific implementation plans for creating supportive workplace environments to enable the use of the SmokeCheck brief intervention in routine health care.
The sites being considered are:

• Coffs Clarence Aboriginal Chronic Care Program (North Coast Area Health)
• Mootang Tarimi Renal Screening Outreach Program (Sydney West Area Health)
• Birra-Li Aboriginal Birthing Service (Hunter New England Area Health)
• Community Health / Aboriginal Health Service (Greater Southern Area Health)

For further information on the HSI project contact Mark Mitchell Senior Project Officer SmokeCheck on 9036 7112