Palliative Care Partnership: a successful model of primary/secondary integration

The health reforms of the 1990s and early 21st century have seen unheralded change in the delivery of health services in New Zealand, and the concept of integration of primary and specialist or secondary services into a seamless health delivery service is one of the key planks of national and regional healthcare planning in New Zealand. This paper reports on a successful primary secondary integration project. Starting with commentary on the historical difficulties that acted as a catalyst to this initiative, it reports on the development process, how the model works in practice, and outlines some initial evaluation work done as part of its quality improvement component. Given the collaborative nature of this project and its scope across primary and specialist care sectors, the authors believe this model has implications and relevance across a wide spectrum of the New Zealand health service.