HealthPathways is a free, online health information portal for healthcare professionals that is designed to be used during patient consultation. From this single website, GPs can identify the most effective treatment and management options, using locally developed clinical guidelines, and quickly determine the most appropriate local specialists and services available for their patients. The HealthPathways program has become instrumental in supporting health professionals with clinical and referral information since it launched in our region five years ago. We now have over 10,000 users who have accumulated over a quarter of a million page views during this time.

Delivering HealthPathways in our diverse region, and ensuring pathway content reflects the specific needs of each area, has been a unique challenge.  Significant consultations with clinical staff, hospital, community specialists, GPs, nurses and allied health professionals have been crucial in developing and maintaining accurate and current information. HealthPathways has become a significant driver of service integration between the primary, tertiary and public health sectors, and is now a valuable and essential inclusion in the design of new and existing services.

The partnerships developed through HealthPathways have allowed us to quickly respond to emerging needs, particularly over the past few years when several natural disasters and COVID-19 impacted our region. We were able to quickly form working groups with key stakeholders to develop pathway content addressing these challenges, ensuring our health professionals could respond efficiently and appropriately.
These relationships have since extended into more collaborative work on shared priorities, including how to foster system redesign and education for all health providers, particularly in the areas of dementia care, palliative care and the long-COVID response.

I would like to thank our HealthPathways team, including our dedicated GP clinical editors and NBMLHD staff for all their hard work over the past five years. We look forward to HealthPathways continuing to respond to our local needs and supporting clinicians to provide the best care to our community.