The Kirketon Road Centre - improving access to primary care for marginalised populations

Marginalised populations, including at risk young people, injecting drug users and sex workers, are vulnerable to a range of preventable health related problems, yet they often have difficulty accessing mainstream primary healthcare services. The Kirketon Road Centre in Kings Cross, Sydney, has been providing accessible and acceptable primary healthcare to these populations for the past 25 years. However, limited scientific evidence for the effectiveness of targeted primary healthcare services for this group of patients makes competing for scarce public health resources difficult. This article outlines some of the issues faced by these populations when accessing traditional health services and describes the work of the Kirketon Road Centre.