Community Management Centre (CMC)

The SESLHD Community Management Centre (CMC) is a district-wide service which partners with existing local services to deliver virtually enabled care. The CMC is designed to complement, not replace, face-to-face or specialised clinical care. 

The CMC is hosted by the Prince of Wales Hospital on the Randwick campus, and is staffed by administrators, nurses and allied health professionals. Escalation pathways from the CMC to local clinical teams are established for each integrated service.  

Services within the CMC support the Virtual Health Strategy focus areas of hospital avoidance (ED presentations and inpatient admissions), inpatient early discharge, virtual rehab and prehab, and data-informed decision-making.
 

The CMC was established in 2021 as a district-wide service, responsible for remotely monitoring the health of Covid19 patients isolating at home. The CMC has also successfully piloted a remote monitoring service for heart failure patients enrolled in the Heart Link service. 

In 2024, the CMC is expanding to support additional district-wide virtual health services, in alignment with the SESLHD Virtual Health Strategy.
 

The Community Management Centre (CMC) is hosted by the Prince of Wales Hospital (POWH) in Randwick. Whilst CMC staff are physically based in Randwick, the CMC is a district-wide service.

Services centralised into the CMC will abide by the following principles:

• CMC services will be integrated into hybrid models of care, delivered in collaboration with local sites and teams. They will support, not replace, face to face care. 
• The CMC will deliver the virtual health services that are most efficiently delivered by a central unit at scale, to reach a greater number of patients regardless of location (e.g. remote monitoring of heart failure patients).
• Local teams will continue to deliver other virtual health services (e.g. telehealth consultations).

The types of services delivered by the CMC can include:

• Remote patient monitoring 
• Virtual triage and review
• Centralised intake services
• Multidisciplinary care coordination via Telehealth

The goal of the CMC is to integrate parts of care (such as remote monitoring, intake and triage services) that can be delivered virtually by a central service at scale (for patients across all sites). This is intended to complement, not replace, existing face-to-face clinical care. 

As the CMC is designed to provide parts of the patient healthcare journey, the service will work directly with local services across SESLHD to define referral pathways into and out of the CMC.  Escalation pathways for each specialty clinical area will be developed, guided and endorsed by local services and relevant governance processes. 
 

For each group of patients interacting with the CMC (eg patients enrolled in a remote monitoring program), escalation pathways will be developed with and endorsed by, local specialist services and clinical governance. This is to ensure safe, high-quality care.

When an escalation of care is required for a patient enrolled in a CMC service, it will follow a clearly defined escalation pathway to the local clinical team with set response times, based on the urgency and severity of the concern. An escalation pathway can be triggered by either clinician review, patient self-escalation or a clinical measurement that falls outside of a defined clinical range. 
 

•    Equitable access to virtual healthcare across the district. 
•    Consistent, high-quality care provided at scale to patients.
•    Proactive management of patients in the community.
•    Patient and clinician choice in how and where care is delivered.
•    Enhanced usage of hospital resources.
 

The Community Management Centre is located on Level 3S of the Acute Services Building at Prince of Wales Hospital. The service can be contacted directly via 1800 222 353. 

To discuss how the SESLHD CMC may benefit your service, contact the Virtual Health team via email at SESLHD-VirtualHealth@health.nsw.gov.au.