For GPs
Which patient should you start with?
Most GPs have more eligible patients than they realise. That sounds like good news, and it is the exact reason this decision stalls — when so many of your patients qualify, it’s hard to know where to begin.
Here is an easier way to think about it.
Start here
You don’t need to find your sickest patient — just the one you’re stuck on.
Read these six and click any that resonate to help focus your decision. It’s not just about searching a list — sometimes a familiar face will emerge.
The one who came to mind
If a specific patient has come to mind, stop reading. They are the one, and putting it off in the hope of finding somebody more suitable will only slow things down for all your patients.
One patient · 40 mins · MBS-funded
A useful reframe
Pick the right patient for the “wrong” reason
The instinct is to start with your most complex patient — surely the obvious choice is the biggest issue you currently face. But trying to determine who is most in need is difficult, and complicates the relative simplicity of your first conference.
Choose the patient where extra input will be most valuable to their care.
You are not triaging. You are finding out whether a room full of other disciplines changes what you do next, and you want to weigh up considered opinions quickly. A patient whose situation is complicated, but not necessarily desperate, may benefit more than the hardest case on your list.
So don’t worry if you can’t immdiately name your most complex patient. They loose nothing by going second — and by the time you do conference them, you will know how this works and get maxium value from the team.
Two constraints worth applying
Narrow it further, deliberately
Both of these shrink the field and make the practical steps disappear.
Someone booked in the next fortnight
Consent is a conversation you have at an appointment you were already having, rather than a phone call you have to remember to make. It also puts a date on the decision, which is most of what stops it drifting. What consent involves.
Someone who will say yes
A patient who already knows their care is spread across several people, and has said as much to you. They tend to be pleased that the people treating them are finally going to speak to each other.
Or skip the remembering
You have already made this list
Every chronic condition management plan you prepared or reviewed last year was you writing down that this patient’s care runs across several people. That is the judgement a case conference starts from — so the plans are the shortlist, and you wrote it months ago.
Start from the plans you wrote
A query in Best Practice or Medical Director returns every patient with a plan prepared or reviewed in the last twelve months. Your practice manager can run it in a few minutes, and you are not the one who has to go looking.
Then take the ones already booked
Plan reviews are recalled and booked by the practice, so a handful of that list is coming in anyway over the next few weeks. Those are patients whose spread of care you are about to sit down and think about — which is the fortnight rule above, arriving ready-made.
Finding the names is administrative, and it is the part that does not need a doctor. The choice stays yours; the search does not have to be. None of this is an eligibility rule — a plan is not a prerequisite, and plenty of suitable patients have never had one. It is simply the shortest route from a blank to a name.
If nobody springs to mind
Then don’t do this part alone
Plenty of GPs get to this point and draw a blank, and it is rarely because there is nobody suitable. Working out who would benefit most is a conversation our clinician-led team has with GPs every week — you describe the shape of your caseload, and between you the name usually appears in a couple of minutes.
The patient is always your call. Getting to the point where the choice is obvious does not have to be.
For completeness
Who is eligible
Any patient with a chronic or complex condition qualifies, and residents of aged care facilities always do. These are the presentations that come up most.
There is no care plan prerequisite, and a patient does not need to already be seeing the clinicians who join the conference. The net is wide on purpose — which is why the question at the top of this page is the more useful one.
Whether a case conference is appropriate for a given patient, and who should take part, remain clinical decisions for the coordinating practitioner.
One patient, one conference
You only have to choose once
Book a pilot conference on a single patient. We find the time, bring the team together and handle the paperwork — you turn up and talk.