RE-ORDER : re-organising the care of depression and related disorders in the Australian Primary Health Care Setting

Abstract

Depression is the single largest cause of disability burden in Australia. GPs provide a great deal of first contact and management for depression in a setting that, to date, has been neither well designed nor adequately resourced for effective depression care. There have been criticisms of inadequate recognition and management of this condition by GPs yet current guidelines are mainly derived from data collected in secondary or tertiary care and available evidence is from health care systems different from Australia (mainly the U.S.). U.S. evidence supports a chronic illness management model that is expensive to implement and has yet to become routine in the settings in which it was developed. The re-order study aimed to gather information to design a new model for improving depression care suited to the Australian primary health care setting.

Over three phases (2005-2008), during a time of major reform, in the primary mental health care system, the project conducted extensive consultations with patient and non-patient stakeholders about their views on exemplary depression care and worked directly with six general practices to document how depression care occurs in the Australian setting. The practice phase sought to identify areas for improvement and develop ground-up, practice-driven interventions and principles for an exemplary model of depression care for Australia. Show more