Are you interested in using your consumer experience and knowledge to help inform healthcare policy, activities and planning?
This guide provides information to help you connect with government and health services to improve healthcare in Victoria.
This project delivered education focused on two major risk factors for stillbirth: fetal growth restriction and decreased fetal movements.
In partnership with the Stillbirth Centre for Research Excellence (CRE), we implemented:
We continued to expand our Maternity and Neonatal ehandbooks, which give clinicians providing maternity care 24-hour access to pathways of care regardless of service location, capability or skill of workforce.
In 2018-19 we added a further 13 topics for our online maternity ehandbook, including antepartum haemorrhage, birth after caesarean, breech presentation, gestational diabetes and more.
Victorian maternity and newborn services have a unique role and requirements in providing safe, high-quality healthcare.
So we developed a clinical governance guide to provide maternity services with service-specific tools and resources to meet the requirements set out in the Victorian Clinical Governance Framework.
We drove quality improvement by allowing maternity services to monitor their own data and clinical performance.
Services can now produce timely, regular dashboard style reports to immediately identify, escalate and respond to performance issues or clinical concerns.
Download our Maternity dashboard user guide
In 2018-19, we visited all maternity services to make sure they are accessing and using their new local maternity dashboards.
Gastro-oesophageal reflux is common in infants but is often misdiagnosed and treated unnecessarily with acid suppression therapy (AST) which can cause harm.
Prior to the pilot project commencing, we found that:
Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death in hospital patients worldwide. It is a time-critical illness requiring early identification and prompt intervention to improve patient mortality outcomes.
We introduced a statewide approach to sepsis assessment and management, and helped emergency departments and urgent care centres recognise and initially manage patients experiencing sepsis.
Paediatric tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy are the most common surgical procedures in childhood, usually for obstructed sleep apnoea or frequent tonsillitis. However, rates of tonsillectomy vary greatly depending on location.
Around 70 hospitals in Victoria perform tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies. Our data shows around 10% of hospitals have readmission rates higher than expected for these surgeries.
In Victoria a rapid response call occurs every 15.9 minutes.
Increasing demand on rapid response services results in stretched resources and inconsistent system responsiveness.
We will reduce repeat rapid response calls and associated impact on rapid response team resources, by producing a resource package to help services:
Population growth and ageing are resulting in more people living longer with chronic and other life limiting illnesses.
We will introduce a standard process to assess outpatients and recognise people with a life limiting illness for early referral to palliative care.
We are testing a standard process at key outpatient clinics.
Improved care for patients living with life limiting illness.