Hearing services and research at the Melbourne Children’s Campus: From screening to great care beyond the hospital

The WHO’s World Hearing Day theme on 3rd March 2021 is ‘Hearing care for all: screen, rehabilitate, communicate’. The Royal Children’s Hospital is home to the Victorian Infant Hearing Screening Program (VIHSP) that has been delivering world-class universal hearing screening to Victorian babies for over a decade. Beyond screening, the RCH Audiology Clinic provides diagnostic care, and the Caring for Hearing Impaired Children (CHIC) Clinic delivers a multidisciplinary medical service that intersects with external audiology and early intervention services for hearing-impaired children beyond the hospital. Both VIHSP and CHIC are integrated with a childhood hearing loss research program at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute to ensure evidence from research informs delivery of the best clinical care.

Embedding Clinical Research Into Great Care: Introducing the Clinical Research Incubator

Advances in health and medical research are accelerating our understanding of disease mechanisms, and leading to new preventative interventions, diagnostic tools and novel therapeutic approaches that are transforming clinical care. Hence, there is an increasing need to better embed clinical research into clinical care delivered at the RCH and to support the development of individuals who are fluent in both clinical care and research.

COVID-19: An Update: What have we learnt over the last 12 months?

Never in the field of health was so much learned by so many in so few months.  This, the opening Grand Round for 2021 will recap the lessons from last year, take stock of where we are in February 2021, describe the complex situation with vaccines, and look to what the year might hold for the pandemic and children in Australia and countries around the world.  Topics will include: Why is COVID-19 less severe in children?  What is the role of schools in transmission and what is the impact of new variants?  Vaccines: who, when and how? The indirect effects of Covid: poverty and malnutrition, measles, loss of education, and child marriage.