After extensive consultation with staff, stakeholders and community representatives over past 12 months, we are pleased to launch our new 2024-2029 Strategic Plan.  

With a vision of Our community experiences better health and wellbeing through a mission to Empower primary healthcare providers to deliver high-quality, accessible and integrated care that meets the needs our community, this new Plan outlines our organisation’s strategic objectives and intended outcomes for the next five years. 

Our new Plan focuses on the key objectives of excellence and impact, building a skilled and influential local primary care workforce, delivering integrated, quality-focused health services and engaging with, and empowering, the community.  

It builds on the strengths and outcomes of our 2019-2024 Strategic Plan and incorporates learnings from the last five years in health, where we all faced unprecedented challenges. At the outset of our 2019-2024 Strategic Plan, no-one could have foreseen what lay ahead. Yet our Strategic Plan provided a robust framework for us to meet these challenges and the changing needs of our primary healthcare providers and community. As an organisation, we showed our agility and responsiveness in times of crisis and proved our value in the local healthcare system. 

During the bushfires and floods, we helped provide critical services such as GP volunteer lists for evacuation centres, information and resources to health professionals during emergencies, increased mental health services, disaster grants for health professionals to better prepare for future emergencies and community wellbeing grants to help our community recover. 

During the pandemic we played a vital role by providing up-to-date clinical information to health professionals, establishing COVID-19 testing and vaccination centres, funding additional local mental health services and more. During all these events, we also advocated to both state and federal governments for the needs of local health professionals and our community.  

We are proud of the community-based services we have been able to establish locally. In mental health we opened two new headspace youth services in Katoomba and Hawkesbury and two Head to Health adult services in Penrith and Hawkesbury. For older people, we introduced WiseMind mental health support for people living in residential aged care homes, Compassionate Communities initiatives to address social isolation and a Care finder service for older people needing help finding aged care services. We increased our region’s access to alcohol and other drugs support by expanding services at Dianella Cottage Lithgow, opening a WHOS service in Penrith and two Street University youth services in Penrith and Katoomba. These are just some examples of services we have provided.  

We are proud of what we have achieved over the last five years, sometimes in difficult circumstances. But there is more work to be done. Our 2024-2029 Strategic Plan will build on this work, ensuring that our collective energy is focused on helping to deliver a more efficient, equitable, integrated and patient-centred health system that meets the future needs of our growing community.