SYNOPSIS

Dr Jane Munro, Head of Rheumatology at RCH, will present 3 different programs of quality of care improvements undertaken over the past decade at RCH. Expect to be confronted by the results of some of this work. Dr Munro challenges you to leave the Grand Round with some new information, some answers but most of all some questions and reflections for your own clinical practice and that of your department.

1. Rheumatology – from little things bigger things grow! Over the past 10 years the Rheumatology Unit has grown from 1 consultant to a comprehensive multidisciplinary clinical & research team with a focus on high quality clinical care & research into autoimmune diseases. Dr Munro will present Rheumatology Unit initiatives, relevant to other specialties, including the day admission RheumCAMP initiative (Rheumatology Comprehensive And Multi-disciplinary Planning) and the Rheumatology Database.

2. Comfort Kids – Improving procedural pain management through organisation-wide change. Dr Munro will present a 10 year culture change journey from the “Just Do It” or “grab ‘em and stab ‘em” era to the current program which aims to deliver better procedural pain management across the hospital. Can change like this occur comprehensively across RCH? Can it be sustainable? Can we (you) do it better?

3. The “Are we meeting your needs?” project – moving beyond our doors at RCH looking at how we communicate with our community-based paediatrician colleagues. Not that well it appears. How can we use these results, obtained at 3 timepoints over 15 years, to improve our own individual practice and improve the care of our patients?

SPEAKER:

Dr Jane Munro is a Paediatric Rheumatologist with a special interest in Pain Medicine. Jane is the Head of the Rheumatology Unit at RCH and Group Leader of the Rheumatology research group at the MCRI. She has a Master in Public Health & is completing a Master in Health Services Management. She is undertaking research in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, childhood rheumatic diseases and paediatric pain management. In 2004, Jane was awarded the Jack Brockhoff Churchill Trust Fellowship and travelled to leading paediatric hospitals internationally to study paediatric pain medicine. She then undertook an NHMRC National Institute of Clinical Studies Fellowship studying quality improvement and procedural pain management. The CLARITY Juvenile Arthritis Biobank study, of which Jane is Principal Investigator along with Dr Justine Ellis (at MCRI), is the leading paediatric rheumatology research program in Australia. Jane was the national Chair of the Australian Paediatric Rheumatology Group (2010-2015). She is the current Australian Co-ordinator for the Pediatric Rheumatology International Trials Organisation (PRINTO) and Co-chair of the international Juvenile Arthritis Outcome Measures in Rheumatology project (OMERACT). The best bit of Jane’s job is working with the wonderful Rheumatology multidisciplinary clinical and research team.