Mullewa Medical Centre wins national award for Aboriginal care

With one GP treating an entire community, Mullewa Medical Centre has been singled out for national praise, recognised for its work treating Aboriginal patients and helping “close the gap” by improving outcomes in type 2 diabetes rates.

The practise won the Closing the Gap gong at the Pen CS Awards held on Wednesday on the Gold Coast.

The centre was given the award for its innovative use of data software to track and investigate health trends and factors in the Aboriginal population treated by the centre.

Mullewa Medical Centre is a solo doctor practice treating a population of 800 people, 39 per cent of which are Aboriginal.

The centre has used health informatics to better understand the demographics of its patients, giving the team more knowledge about the chronic diseases Mullewa’s population faces.

Dr Nalini Rao, the centre’s sole doctor, has been focusing on type 2 diabetes in Mullewa, a disease that Aboriginal people and Torres Stait Islanders are four times more likely to have.

In the four years Dr Rao has analysed this data, the centre’s treatment of type 2 diabetes has greatly improved, with a drop in the number of patients exhibiting blood glucose indicators for the disease from 30 per cent to 12 per cent.

Dr Rao said it was a great honour to be recognised for her work.

“It means that what I’m doing is having an outcome and it just encourages us to do better,” she said.

Dr Rao said she hoped to now use the data analysis techniques to better understand respiratory and cardiac diseases.

Pen CS CEO Edweana Wenkart congratulated the centre on the award and commended the team for their work.

“Mullewa Medical Centre are a prime example of using data to support better patient outcomes,” she said.