Urgent care – Helping 1.5 million Aucklanders access better urgent care services, as well as many others throughout New Zealand have access to quality urgent care.

Synergia is the most experienced consultancy group supporting Urgent Care in Aotearoa, having clinical expertise in the specialty as well as deep understanding of the information needed to drive improvement.

We have long-term and ongoing quality improvement projects in urgent care in Metro Auckland and Te Manawa Taki regions, and simultaneously provide data infrastructure for the Royal New Zealand College of Urgent Care. We have also done work in Capital and Coast on models of care, for ACC on urgent care quality indicators and for Te Whatu Ora on clinic sustainability.

We have been the project management, chair and provided clinical leadership in Metro Auckland since 2011. This was originally as the ARAHN (Auckland Regional After Hours Network) and now as PAUA (Patient Afterhours and Urgent Access) SLAT.

In Auckland we have:

• Project managed the alliance of Te Whatu Ora Primary Care / Living well, Emergency Department, Urgent Care Clinic, PHO, POAC and ACC representatives to meet regularly, problem solve issues and remain focused despite competing interests.
• Implemented a data infrastructure which contains 10 million consults to Urgent Care Clinics, EDs and St John to understand the utilisation and provide regular insight to all organisations in the alliance, as well as feeding into national discussions.
• Operationalised a number of initiatives including extended hours care at clinics since the beginning of the alliance, COVID clinics and testing, St John redirection to UCCs, UCC telehealth pilot to Healthline, all of which increased access to urgent care clinics and decreased emergency department attendances.
• Chaired a Clinical Subgroup to solve clinical issues and find resolutions and learnings between organisations, creating trust between clinical leadership.
• Reviewed POAC and Auckland Regional Health Pathways utilisation and provided information to inform best practice at UCC in the use of these system enablers.
• Created Quality Indicators for the Auckland Urgent Care system, which are updated quarterly and allow funders and other organisations certainty on the care being delivered.
• Provided clinic and clinician level data on patients seen at hospital after a primary care attendance, to help clinics benchmark their care and clinicians understand the true outcomes for their patients.

In Te Manawa Taki we have:

Reviewed and identified sustainable approaches to Urgent Care at three clinics with recommendations implemented to:

• Make the clinics sustainable until the review of urgent care by Te Whatu Ora
• Increase access for children Under 14
• Improve equity through capping co-pays for people in need
• Smooth the utilisation of clinics by patients to enable more effective rostering and timely care.

As one of the strands of work that Synergia is expert in, we will continue to support national and regional thinking of how to provide accessible, equitable and quality urgent care.

We plan to provide leadership alongside ACC and Te Whatu Ora as the model of urgent care is defined so that it can continue to be an important part of the New Zealand healthcare system.