HNECC has implemented 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. A Modified Hanlon Method for Prioritising Health Problems has been used to score and rank in priority order a sub-set of the Health Needs from the updated Core Needs Assessment.

To perform this exercise, representatives from the HNECC Health Planning team attended a meeting of each of the Clinical Councils to guide council members through scoring the Seriousness of each health need. Individual scores were than averaged across all participating Clinical Council members to calculate a score for each need. The HNECC Executive team determined the Feasibility of addressing each health need and the HNECC Health Planning team calculated the Size of the population affected by each health need. Once the needs were scored against each of the factors, a total priority score was calculated for each using the following formula: Total score = (A + 2B) x C. The needs were then ranked by score, with the highest scoring need considered to be of the highest priority and so forth.

This approach has been used to prioritise the Health Needs specific to General Population Health and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health. The equivalent Service Needs will now be prioritised using the same method as for the Health Needs, however Size and Seriousness of a Service Need will be conceptualised as the Size of the population affected by the Service deficiencies and the Seriousness of the impact on the population resulting from the Service deficiencies. Needs specific to Primary Mental Health Care and Suicide Prevention, or Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment will be prioritised using this methodology later in 2019, with Seriousness being scored by specific Reference Groups rather than the Clinical Councils in their entirety.