FAQs

Western Victoria Primary Health Network is an organisation that works to support local doctors and other health professionals, fund health services, and make links between different services to make our health system work more efficiently. We operate in 21 municipalities in western Victoria (as shown in the map below).

We want to understand the needs of the communities that we service. Every three years, we ask the people that live and work in our communities about the health issues they face, and what services they need to feel healthier.

This year we asked the following questions:

• What health problems are most important to you and your community?
• What services and other changes are needed to address these issues?
• What are the existing things in your community that help people be healthier and happier?

We will bring all the things we heard from our communities together and see if there are any common ideas or thoughts. We will then combine this with the other information we gather, such as the different rates of disease in different areas. 

When we have all of this information, we will consider the issues raised by asking ourselves the following questions:

• Is this an existing priority for the Western Victoria Primary Health Network or something new?
• How much does this issue affect our communities?
• Is there anything that we can do to limit the impact of the issue on our communities?
• Are others working on this issue in our communities?
• Is there funding available to work on this issue?

We will then identify priority areas for the Western Victoria Primary Health Network to focus on from 2024 to 2027.

We know that we won’t be able to directly work on all the issues raised in our conversations with our communities. An issue may not be primary care-related. We may not have resources available to address a particular issue. But what we can do is share this information with government and other organisations that may be able to work on the issues you have identified.

We will publish a summary of what we heard and our priority areas on our project page here. You can sign up to receive updates on this page.

You can click on the 'stay informed' button to receive updates or you can call 03 5222 0800 to speak to a team member.