Find care fast this holiday season
Dec 10, 2024
Find care fast this holiday season
Dec 10, 2024
FindCareFast is a new virtual navigation service helping people across Greater Brisbane find the right healthcare option for their needs.
Launched ahead of the Christmas and New Year period when healthcare options can be limited, the FindCareFast website aims to alleviate the often complicated and overwhelming task of finding the right healthcare service when you are not sure where to go.
FindCareFast helps to direct and connect people to their local primary care, urgent care, emergency care, mental healthcare and allied health service providers. It can also assist in directing people to other healthcare options when their usual General Practitioner (GP) or healthcare provider is closed, but same-day medical attention may be required.
FindCareFast empowers the user to make their own decisions about what healthcare service option is right for them, including navigation to the healthdirect online Symptom Checker and 13 HEALTH phone line for support with deciding where to go for treatment and advice.
When landing on the homepage, website users are asked to consider if they think their healthcare concern can wait, if they need help soon, or need help now, and provides appropriate care options.
Accompanying the website launch is a digital and out of home consumer media campaign that also seeks to educate the community about primary healthcare and the role of a person’s regular (or family) GP or doctor in providing routine healthcare, as well as new and available urgent healthcare pathways.
FindCareFast is a collaboration between Brisbane North PHN and Brisbane South PHN, available to all residents across Greater Brisbane.
- seamlessly integrates with healthdirect and the National Health Services Directory (NHSD) to place healthcare options at users' fingertips and display the most up-to-date health service and contact information
- is user-friendly, built around best practice accessibility principles, plain language and offers language translation functionality to assist people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to navigate the site
- features an after-hours mode which will direct users to available services open outside of business hours
- includes dedicated healthcare service options for First Nationspeoples.
People in need of healthcare service options this holiday season can access FindCareFast via desktop or mobile browser to find an available, or next available, healthcare pathway nearest to them at any time of day.
“The FindCareFast website and accompanying campaign, now in market, will support and educate our community to find the right care, at the right place, at the right time. It is a credit to the hard work, shared insights and time spent by our many partners, collaborators and PHN teams,” said Sharon Sweeney, Acting CEO at Brisbane North PHN.
“We’re so pleased to have FindCareFast added to the range tools and supports we provide to local primary health professionals and our communities, to help deliver a connected and coordinated primary care system for our diverse and multicultural region,” said Laura Casey, General Manager for System Integration and Coordination at Brisbane South PHN.
FindCareFast will be particularly helpful to people as they discover the many new, free urgent care facilities available when they’re sick or injured and need same-day treatment, but don’t need treatment in a hospital emergency department.
Urgent care is an emerging model of care offered via Medicare Urgent Care Clinics (UCCs), Minor Injury and Illness Clinics, nurse-led clinics, and some private general practices, that provide walk-in, timely healthcare services to patients in a general practice setting. Urgent care clinics can provide short-term, episodic care for non-life-threatening conditions that require same day assessment or treatment.
Medicare UCCs, Minor Injury and Illness Clinics located at state Satellite Hospitals, and Nurse-led Walk-In Clinics are bulk-billed (incurring no out of pocket expense to the patient).
Medicare UCCs are open extended hours, seven days a week, for urgent care.
The website was informed by regional health needs assessments and built following a robust consultation period with community groups, individuals, and health service providers including local GPs and General Practice Liaison Officers, Metro North Health and Metro South Health, Queensland Health, 13HEALTH, Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), and Virtual Emergency Care Service.
The Greater Brisbane community can access FindCareFast online.
