In recognition of outstanding results achieved by the Eating Disorders Program, the team received a highly prestigious Award at the Royal Children’s Hospital Annual Staff Awards Night held on Tuesday November 15, 2011.

In accepting the Team Award on behalf of the multidisciplinary team, Professor Sawyer, Director of the Centre for Adolescent Health, spoke of the huge toll that anorexia nervosa takes on adolescents and their families and of the team’s determination and commitment  to find new ways to address this challenging condition.

A particular challenge for the team was that the RCH experienced a 300 per cent increase in admissions of adolescents with anorexia nervosa from 2004-2008, which threatened to overwhelm the team’s capacity to respond to these complex patients. At the same time, growing research supported the role of Family-Based Treatment as first line therapy in adolescents with anorexia nervosa.

In 2009, this led the Centre for Adolescent Health to introduce Victoria’s first comprehensive, multidisciplinary Family-Based Treatment model of care for adolescents with eating disorders. The team is made up of paediatricians, mental health experts including family based therapists, nurses, dietitians, social workers, and includes those with music therapy and education expertise – as well as researchers. The team’s co-leaders are Dr Michele Yeo, adolescent physician at the Centre for Adolescent Health and Dr Andrew Court, psychiatrist, Integrated Mental Health Service.

Funded by the Baker Foundation, the team has ambitiously embarked upon standardisation of clinical care practices in order to drive consistency of care and improve clinical outcomes. These efforts have also underpinned the team’s development of an integrated clinical research agenda, including a large randomised controlled trial that is comparing two different forms of Family-Based Treatment.

To date, the team’s achievements include:

We offer clinical care consistent with world’s best practice and have greatly improved our clinical outcomes for adolescents with eating disorders.

• We have significantly reduced the number of hospital admissions with anorexia nervosa. Prior to implementing Family-Based treatment, our admissions peaked at 130 per year.  By 2010, the team had reduced this to only 50 per year with a much more satisfied and less stressed staff.  

• We have developed a new research agenda in adolescent eating disorders.

In accepting the award, Professor Sawyer spoke of the challenges of implementing Family-Based Treatment, as every member of the treating team’s role changed as a result of the new model of care.

“We could never have achieved such outstanding clinical outcomes without the commitment to improving the quality of our care that was demonstrated by every member of this team. I feel extraordinarily proud of what has been achieved”. 

The RCH Eating Disorders Program is now nationally recognised as a leading eating disorders service. This is because of the strength of the multidisciplinary team that is a vibrant collaboration between the Centre for Adolescent Health and the RCH Mental Health service, strongly supported by the adolescent inpatient unit and RCH Nutrition and Food Services.

Our Adolescent Medicine Manager, John Vernon said:

“The Awards event was uplifting for me and others because people were being recognized for human values as much as the actual professional work they did.

For our own award for the Eating Disorders Program, the team in this instance was a bunch of clinicians from 4 different departments, including the adolescent in-patient ward, focused on a particular need, making the work better and making the patients better”.

The Centre for Adolescent Health and the staff of our multidisciplinary Eating Disorders Program are very proud to have received such recognition from the Royal Children’s Hospital. The Program was also highlighted in the 2011 RCH Quality of Care Report.

Congratulations to the Team!