Our Origin

Yeerongpilly, we’ve arrived! Sandstone opened its second location at Yeerongpilly. The new practice serves a different community with the same commitment to team-based care, longer appointments, and proactive health management. It was created to contribute to the financial stability of our non-profit mission and creates space to progress new models and patient care. Two locations to strengthen the whole.

Sandstone serves more older patients than almost any other general practice in its region — more than 40 per cent more patients who are over 75. With funding first from Brisbane South PHN and later Queensland Health, the team led research reviewing over 48,000 studies to design a Life Course Model of Care for adults aged 45 and over. Evidence shows that planned, proactive care can extend healthy living by at least five years. The Centre’s work reframes ageing as a stage to prepare for, not endure. Now presented at national conferences, the model continues to influence thinking on prevention, screening and lifelong wellbeing.

In 2024, Sandstone received a national Stronger Medicare Award from the Prime Minister, recognising innovative care for multicultural and marginalised patients. Fewer than a dozen practices across Australia received this distinction. It acknowledged that equity-focused care is both good medicine and good policy. For Sandstone’s founding leaders, the award symbolised national validation of an approach built quietly over decades — team-based, inclusive and focused on those most often left behind.

In 2023, Sandstone joined six other Brisbane practices to form the Health Equity Coalition — a network advocating for fair funding for clinics serving disadvantaged communities. Together they produced a policy paper showing that caring for those with complex needs takes longer and costs more, yet is reimbursed less. Their work led to small government grants to test new funding and service models. The coalition makes visible what equity in healthcare truly costs. In 2024, the CEO co-authored Getting Australia’s Health on Track for the Commonwealth Department of Health, strengthening the national case for sustainable primary care in low-income areas.

In 2022, Sandstone began influencing national policy, contributing directly to reform through presentations to the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce. Next came an appointment to the Expert Advisory Panel reviewing incentive and after-hours funding. Drawing on years of practical experience in integrated care, Sandstone helped shape recommendations that prioritised team-based funding and multidisciplinary models. The insights gained at the frontline became part of the blueprint for a stronger primary care system. The panel’s final report, accepted by the Minister for Health, reflects principles Sandstone has practiced for years — collaboration, evidence, good governance and fairness in care delivery.

Cubiko began as a complex spreadsheet built each week to help Sandstone manage its Inala operations. Seeing its value to others, the team developed it into a digital platform now supporting management decisions in around one third of general practices nationwide. Creating a software company from within a general practice was unusual. The funding received from selling down shares has allowed Sandstone to offset losses and expand to a second site at Yeerongpilly. Not bad for an idea that just helped keep the doors open and make better decisions.

Sandstone joined a ten-site research trial in 2017 testing post-discharge medication reviews led jointly by GPs and pharmacists. Readmissions dropped by 78%. Building on that success, Sandstone integrated pharmacists permanently into its care team from 2021, extending medication safety and chronic-disease support. It proved that pharmacists belong inside the care team, not outside the door. In 2024, Sandstone co-authored the RACGP’s submission calling for national funding for non-dispensing pharmacists — a recommendation adopted in the government’s final general practice incentive-funding review.

In 2016, joint research with hepatologists identified Inala as one of Queensland’s hotspots for liver disease. Sandstone partnered with specialists to create HepReach — a program enabling GPs to deliver screening, monitoring and access to curative Hepatitis C treatment in the community. Over six years, the service reduced barriers to care and proved that complex treatment could be delivered safely outside hospitals. Funding challenges led to closure of HepReach in early 2025, and most patients were redirected back to hospital services. It remains an example of how community-based teams can match hospital outcomes when systems support them.

In 2016, Sandstone was named AGPAL General Practice of the Year — the highest recognition from Australia’s largest accreditation body. AGPAL audits thousands of practices each year against clinical governance, systems, and care quality. Sandstone stood out for its use of digital systems and data to support proactive management of chronic disease. Managing complex care needs the right systems — ones that give clinicians more time for patients. The award recognised a culture where detail, learning and teamwork create consistency and safety for patients every day.

In 2015, a Churchill Fellowship took Tracey Johnson, Sandstone’s CEO, overseas where she studied emerging social prescribing models. Sandstone soon began advocating to link clinical teams with social supports. By 2018, Sandstone secured funding for an onsite social worker and contributed to the first national report on social prescribing. This model of care has since been embraced by many Primary Health Networks (PHNs). Health outcomes improve when social needs are addressed alongside medical ones. Sandstone spoke at the first national roundtable and continued to advocate, providing testimony to a Parliamentary Inquiry in 2021. That advocacy led to Queensland Government funding for a social prescribing pilot through ten neighbourhood centres. Inala is the only site to share a social worker between a neighbourhood centre and a general practice; community care in action!

When Mater’s Refugee Health Service lost funding in 2012, its nurses needed a new base for specialist care. Building on Sandstone’s diabetes co-location experience, a new model was trialled, embedding Mater refugee health nurses directly within general practice. Sandstone was the second site and its research capacity helped document outcomes: 400–500 people supported each year, replicable protocols and shared learning across Brisbane clinics. The focus was to remove barriers so refugee patients could enter the health system through trust, not trauma. The model was complemented by MCHOOSE, a joint innovation which added care navigation and social work supports, and won the 2022 Integrated Care Award. Now permanently funded, it continues to link new Australians to sustained care across 10 sites in Brisbane.

Between 2013 and 2017, the Hong Kong Hospital Authority selected Sandstone as an international training site for chronic disease management in primary care. Nurses completed month-long placements to observe integrated care and nursing leadership in action. The program brought revenue that helped sustain the clinic through lean years and gave the nursing team a global platform to share their expertise. Political changes ended the program in 2017, but connections remain strong and renewed exchange is expected as Australia–Hong Kong collaboration reopens.

Recognising how often diabetes leads to kidney disease, Sandstone partnered with two hospitals to co-design a new model of renal care in general practice. Together they retrained clinicians, shared data and tested outcomes through the Keeping Kidneys Service. Over four years the program achieved hospital-level results at lower cost and higher patient satisfaction, winning awards from Kidney Health Australia and Queensland Health. It showed that prevention and coordination could improve patient outcomes. When hospital funding ended in 2016, hundreds of patients lost access. It was a turning point that deepened Sandstone’s resolve to advocate for fair, community-based funding.

In 2008, endocrinologist Dr Tony Russell and GP Professor Claire Jackson led a translational research project to test whether general practice could deliver specialist-level diabetes care. Sandstone was the sole community site for the trial, building a new model of integrated, team-based care for its growing population with complex diabetes. The service embedded a hospital diabetes educator onsite and trained GPs to manage advanced cases locally. The model halved costs, cut hospitalisations by 75%, and became known as Queensland’s first “beacon clinic.” Still funded fifteen years later, it remains proof that integration works.

In March 2007, Inala Primary Care opened its doors. The First Responders—new staff, Board, partners and patients—hit the ground running. The stage was set to create a new model of primary care that would continue to draw on this original courage, energy, teamwork and a belief in fairness. Quality care no matter where we live. “We got their trust and asked for three years to prove it could work. Then, we did it in two!”

The Rescue Team started networking, advocating, strategising. They’d need a lot of ‘stars to align’ to cover a $750,000 annual operating deficit. Undaunted, they worked day after day to make a new NFP entity happen. They found the funding, proved viability, won over allies and began designing what would become a groundbreaking diabetes project. Along the way, they transformed the building: from five consulting rooms to fifteen. Over two years, they built the case for a new way to deliver team-based, multi-disciplinary primary care.

Queensland Health announced the Inala Community Health Centre would close. A rescue team, a small group of clinicians, researchers and public health reformers jumped in to save it. They wouldn’t take no for an answer. The stakes were high and it was never going to be easy. It was a perfect storm: Queensland Health wanting out, University of Queensland worried about losing their major teaching site, a community that would be left without a service, and a determined group holding on to something unique.