Beacon Strategies worked with Brisbane South PHN to understand how general practitioners experience engagement and develop a practical strategy for stronger relationships, meaningful influence and better-connected care.
Background
Brisbane South PHN engaged Beacon Strategies to develop a GP Engagement Strategy grounded in the experience of general practitioners and the realities of the regional health system. The work examined how communication, relationships, participation, commissioning, service integration and advocacy shape the relationship between general practice and the PHN.
The project responded to a strategic challenge broader than communication alone: how a PHN can build trusted, clinically credible relationships with independent practices and create visible pathways for GP knowledge to influence services, commissioning and regional priorities.
Approach
We combined direct GP engagement, evidence review and engagement theory to move from practitioner experience to an actionable organisational strategy.
Gathered GP perspectives through a mixed engagement process incorporating a survey, interviews and listening sessions.
Organised the findings across six connected domains spanning communication and relevance, relationship and access, participation and co-design, clinical value and service integration, commissioning, and system advocacy.
Interpreted the findings through complementary theories of motivation, relational coordination, boundary spanning, co-production, institutional logics and network governance.
Connected GP experiences with evidence on clinician engagement, structural barriers, clinical leadership, segmentation, relationship management and meaningful participation.
Used futures analysis to explore how the relationship could evolve according to relationship quality and GP influence.
Developed strategic initiatives, an implementation roadmap and a practical maturity assessment approach for monitoring change over successive implementation cycles.
Project deliverable
GP Engagement Strategy — the final strategy brought together GP engagement findings, an evidence-informed theoretical framework, strategic futures, practical initiatives, an implementation roadmap and a repeatable approach to assessing engagement maturity.
Outcome
The project produced a practical GP Engagement Strategy centred on four connected directions: clinically intelligent engagement; visible GP influence; services designed around usual care; and recognition of general practice as regional system infrastructure.
The strategy reframed engagement as a core relationship and governance function, rather than a series of communications or isolated consultation activities. It established relationship quality and GP influence as the two central conditions for meaningful partnership between general practice and the PHN.
An implementation roadmap translated the strategy into an iterative cycle of establishing foundations, testing the approach in priority areas, completing an engagement maturity assessment, and refining the next cycle of work. The maturity approach provides a practical way to judge whether relationships and influence are improving, stable or declining and to adjust implementation accordingly.
Link to our vision
A more impactful social purpose sector — this project supports our vision by strengthening the conditions for general practice to contribute meaningfully to regional planning, service design and system improvement. It provides Brisbane South PHN with a practical framework for building trusted relationships, making GP influence visible and connecting engagement more closely to better-coordinated care.
How we can help
We support Primary Health Networks and other health organisations to build meaningful stakeholder relationships, translate engagement insight into strategy and create practical systems for implementation and learning.
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