Branch comments on National Registration Standards

ADAVB has lodged its submission on the draft national registration standards with the Dental Board of Australia . The Branch generally welcomed most of the proposed arrangements but felt restricted in commenting on some areas because of the lack of accompanying guidelines.

The submission was prepared with the assistance of a number of members who provided comments. Thanks to those members who took the time to offer their considered views.

On the CPD standard, ADAVB suggested that after the first three-year cycle, the infection control requirement of two hours be reduced to two hours in future cycles.

Responding to the scope of practice standard, ADAVB queried how dental therapists, oral health therapists and dental hygienists can “exercise autonomous decision making” while not being independent practitioners in terms of training. Depending on the information to be provided in the guidelines, ADAVB is concerned at the lack of defined duties in this standard and asked the Board to review it in order to avoid uncertainty.

Pay for performance arrangements under consideration

Another paper published by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library may have implications for dentists, along with other health practitioners. The paper address the question 'Should we expand the use of pay-for performance in health care?'

According to the Executive Summary "this paper examines the evidence on the impact of P4P schemes in health care. While the evidence is limited and yields mixed results, some experts argue that this should not spell the end for P4P. Instead. they suggest that policy-makers proceed with caution and use the existing evidence to highlight the challenges commonly associated with the use of P4P in health care. Some of the most important challenges are designing a system with:

• substantial rewards and targets that are reasonably difficult to achieve;
• minimal unintended consequences and incentives to 'game' the system; and
• incentives to both the best and worst performers to improve the quality of health care."

Presumably the Parliamentary Library has not produced this paper merely as an academic exercise, and someone in Canberra thinks this is a policy initiative that should be pursued.

Denticare - an overview by the Parliamentary Library

The Commonwealth Parliamentary Library has prepared an overview of the proposed Denticare scheme.

The 12-page background note outlines the features of Denticare Australia and looks at the responses to the proposal including costs and equity. ADA’s concerns are highlighted along with feedback from various other parties.

Health Ministers announce progress on e-Health

The Australian Health Ministers' Conference issued a Communique today affirming their commitment to the introduction in 2010 of national healthcare identifier numbers and agreed to release for further consultation draft legislation for establishing the healthcare identifiers.

Ministers considered feedback from the first phase of public consultations held in July-August 2009. Following these consultations and feedback, further work has been done on the identifiers to clarify and strengthen patient privacy. Ministers have now agreed:

• the legislative framework will limit the use of healthcare identifiers to health information management and communication purposes as part of delivering a healthcare service;
• healthcare identifiers will be underpinned by effective national privacy arrangements, protecting health information wherever it is associated with healthcare identifiers, regardless of whether the information is held by a public or private organisation;
• the Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service) will have an appropriate governance framework with transparent and accountable processes;
• penalties will apply to the misuse of healthcare identifiers; and
• to review the implementation of the healthcare identifiers after a period of two years.

According to the Communique, Healthcare Identifiers are unique numbers that will be given to all healthcare providers, healthcare organisations and healthcare consumers. These unique numbers will provide a new level of confidence when communicating patient information between the myriad of private and government healthcare providers and systems. The identifiers are considered an important building block for the eventual introduction of a patient controlled Individual Electronic Health Record.

Members are referred to the CEO's Comments in the September and November editions of the ADAVB Newsletter for further information about e-Health developments affecting dentistry.

The legislation to establish the Healthcare Identifiers will be introduced to the Federal Parliament in the Autumn 2010 sittings.