Refugee Health Data Sharing Project: Improving the referral process of newly arrived refugees to general practices
Caring for newly arrived patients from refugee backgrounds is rewarding and complex work. People from refugee backgrounds can often arrive in Australia with physical, mental and psychosocial challenges, and low levels of health literacy when navigating the Australian healthcare system.
The Refugee Health Data Sharing Project seeks to collate general practice data to:
improve the referral process of newly arrived refugees to general practices in our region
assist your general practice in the care for newly arrived patients from refugee backgrounds.
How the Refugee Health Data Sharing Project will work
Mater Integrated Refugee Health Service and Metro South Refugee Health Service work alongside Brisbane South PHN to support general practices in providing primary care to patients from refugee backgrounds in the Brisbane South PHN region.
All 3 organisations collect and use data in organisation-specific databases about general practices in the local region.
The data sharing project will use Primary Sense data currently collected from participating general practices in the Brisbane South PHN region, in addition to specific refugee-health data collected through practice visits by the PHN’s Cultural Diversity Team and/or a refugee health service.
This data will then be collated into a dashboard that can then be used across the 3 organisations.
The data in this dashboard will help us identify:
areas where we may need to recruit more general practices for refugee health support
how we can support general practice staff and clinicians through practice visits and resources
information regarding languages spoken by clinicians, special interest areas of clinicians, engagement of interpreters etc.
Data privacy information
The information in this dashboard will only be used internally by Brisbane South PHN, Mater Integrated Refugee Health Service and Metro South Refugee Health Service.
Please note there is no identifiable clinical patient information being collected in this dataset.
There will be information about the general practices in our region included in this dataset.
General practices can choose to opt-out of sharing their data with us
General practices that use the Primary Sense platform have the option to opt out of sharing Primary Sense data for this project before Wednesday17 September 2025.
To opt out of sharing your existing Primary Sense data to this particular project, please submit this online survey.
If you have questions about this project or the opting out process, please contact Brisbane South PHN’s Cultural Diversity Team at multicultural@bsphn.org.au.
General practice support for Primary Sense is available
For further support, contact Brisbane South PHN's Primary Health team at support@bsphn.org.au or phone 07 3864 7555.