> About us > Annual Report 2007 > Directors report

Libby Kalucy, PHC RIS

Since 2000 PHC RIS has matured to become a confident capable organisation which possesses great corporate knowledge. I like to think PHC RIS' role in connecting people and informing them has contributed to the maturation of both the PHCRED Strategy and the Divisions Network. As the only organisation with a contractual role with both of these domains, we are ideally placed to bring together the research sector (PHCRED) and the development section (Divisions), with evaluation - the essential link between the two.

It has been very pleasing for me this year to see how successful PHC RIS has been in taking on some large projects in both domains in which we work - the PHCRED research domain and the Divisions of General Practice domain.

Producing the Snapshot of Australian primary health care research, which will be launched in 2008, gave us an opportunity to see the diversity of primary health care research and the impact it is having. When the publication is published in 2008, it will contribute to a better understanding of primary health research. This project fitted very well with the second stage of our project to examine the impact of primary

health care research and the pathways by which impact occurs. Again, there was synergy with the project examining networking at the GP & PHC Research Conference, as this is a major pathway to research collaborations and dissemination. As interest increases world wide in research transfer and exchange, we have found these applied research projects are very timely.

The major projects in the Divisions domain involve improving access to data and information through on-line means. Since the National Quality and Performance System was first applied to organisations in the Divisions network in 2005, PHC RIS has been working with the Primary and Ambulatory Care Division towards a fully on-line system for planning and reporting. Without such systems, display and analysis of consistent data is very difficult, as was demonstrated in the first year of reporting using word documents. The system that PHC RIS has developed is sophisticated and thorough, as a result of close collaboration with an excellent working group which included people from central and state offices of the Department, Divisions, state based organisations, and the Australian General Practice Network. It has made a great difference to the ease with which the results of Divisions activities can be viewed and made accessible to the many groups of people interested. To develop this on-line system, PHC RIS' skilled IT staff built on the success of transforming the Annual Survey of Divisions to an on-line format the previous year. The display of results from the Survey has matured greatly in 2007, so that diverse users can choose from a wide selection of formats, from maps, fast facts, tables and graphs to the full report to view the data.

As an information service we aim to embody what the literature continues to suggest, that knowledge management encompasses both relationships and information management systems. What keeps PHC RIS staff going is our interaction with our stakeholders, when we can learn what people from policy, research and the Divisions network need and what they think of the services we provide. We can then develop or improve the systems to make the right codified information available in the preferred manner.

PHC RIS is always an exciting place to work, though it requires some strong swimming at times to keep our heads above the surge of fascinating information which we generate, manage and share.