HNECC has developed a strategy to prioritise the Health Needs identified through the Needs Assessment process, which will strengthen the capacity of HNECC to respond to local needs. This Health Needs Prioritisaton Strategy involves using a modified version of the Hanlon Method for Prioritising Health Problems, a popular technique for objectively scoring health needs to create a list of priorities.

This strategy is being led by the Health Planning team with involvement from the Clinical Councils and the Executive team. The strategy is presented in greater detail below but involves scoring the identified health needs against three key factors. The Heath Planning team will guide the three Clinical Councils through a process of scoring the Seriousness of each need and create an average Seriousness score for each. The Health Planning team will also calculate the Size of each need and work with the Executive team to score the Feasibility of addressing each of the needs. Each of these three processes will occur independently and will feed into a final priority score for each need which will be calculated by the Health Planning team. Once a priority score has been calculated, health needs will be ranked by score, with the highest scoring need considered to be of the highest priority and so forth.

Please note, this strategy is only suitable for prioritising the Health Needs (i.e. rural health disparities; or high rates of overweight and obesity), not the Service Needs (i.e. lack of health service integration; or coordination and information sharing). Also, due to the volume of Health Needs identified for the HNECC PHN region, this technique will initially be used to rank the identified needs specific to General Population Health and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health, and not those specific to Primary Mental Health Care and Suicide Prevention, or Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment.