Strategic management of Australia’s primary health networks: learning from Horvath’s review

Australia’s on-going restructuring of primary healthcare is a critical strategic management exercise. In that restructuring; Horvath’s review introduced a shift from Medicare Locals (MLs) to Primary Health Networks (PHNs), with promises of more efficient approach towards an integrated healthcare. There are concerns regarding transparency of Horvath’s review and the inconsistencies between his opinion and that of previous Australian Medicare Local Alliance. Given that inconsistencies between stakeholders’ understandings could lead to faulty strategic management of Primary health networks, there is a need to study Horvath’s review in greater detail. This paper has analysed Horvath’s review, with an independent view, particularly, assessing the commonalities and differences between Horvath’s recommendations and the opinion of other ML reviews submitted by different stakeholders. A systematic approach was taken to select ML reviews from organisations that operate at a national level and lesser likely to be biased due to association with previous ML operations. Qualitative constant comparison technique was applied to code data from Horvath’s and other stakeholder’s ML reviews. Authors have identified points where Horvath’s recommendation could be embellished further and accordingly, proposed five themes as focus areas for planning of implementation of PHNs. These themes are: increased funding, reducing waste, multidisciplinary stakeholder management, performance measures and metrics and effective communication. This research has contributed to conceptualise the strategic management mapping of Ginter, Duncan and Swayne (2013), in the context of Australian primary health care. With the lens of such mapping, authors have also articulated each of the five themes, as described in the findings, for pragmatic learning regarding service delivery and support strategies for Primary health networks. The method and scope of this paper had to be curtailed because restructuring of Australian Primary Health Networks is an empirical issue and there was scarcity of peer-reviewed literature on this topic. Keywords: Australian primary healthcare (I1), strategic management (M1), service delivery strategy (M1), support strategy (M1), Primary Health Networks (PHNs) (I1), Horvath’s review