For the last quarter of a century the Centre for Community Child Health has been working with families, communities and government to improve outcomes of all children by focusing on how to provide great care everywhere. This has included clinical services through to place-based service innovation across health and education.
Neuro-Oncology had stagnated for several decades with little to no improvement in patient outcomes despite marked improvements in other areas of paediatric oncology. With the advent of advanced genomics and epigenomics and an explosion in our understanding of disease, we are finally seeing improvements. Dr Hansford will discuss the advances in modern Paediatric Neuro-Oncology and highlight the opportunities, problems and challenges as we push for better cure rates and quality of survivorship into the future for children with brain tumours.
Wherever the overall health of children improves, cancer inevitably emerges as a serious unmet health need. However, the spectacular improvement in the outcome of childhood cancer in Australia, and other high-income countries, is yet to be seen in in low- and middle-income countries, where 80% of the world’s children live.
Qualitative research has quietly and gradually moved from fringe to mainstream in health research. In this presentation, clinical and health services researchers from across Melbourne Children’s Campus will discuss the ways in which qualitative research can add value to health care research, and describe some of their own qualitative studies. Come along to gain an insight into the research that is happening around you, think about how qualitative research might work in your area of interest, and get up to speed on resources available to support and assist clinicians in performing rigorous qualitative research.
Dr Doug Bryan is a paediatrician who has worked at the Royal Children’s Hospital since 1970. During those 48 years the prognosis and life prospects for children with chronic and complex medical conditions have improved dramatically. This has occurred partly from the discovery of new interventions but also in large part to the development of systems of care that specifically focus on the care and needs of these children and their families.
Addressing the increasing complexity of care is a new challenge in tertiary hospitals. We also all agree that a holistic approach is the standard of care. Multidisciplinary teams have the potential to offer a greater level of expertise with a more diverse approach to work on common goals of care.
Wilms tumour (WT) is the second most common abdominal tumour in children. It has an excellent prognosis with a 5-year survival close to 90%. Nevertheless, the story is not finished, as we have to understand why 10% of children continue to have a poor prognosis.
Pediatric rapid response systems were first described right at RCH Melbourne in a paper published in 2005. The medical emergency team and the activation criteria described in that paper helped launch worldwide efforts to implement rapid response systems to reduce cardiac arrest and mortality, and inspired researchers to pursue efforts to refine and further improve systems to detect deteriorating patients. Now, 11 years after the original description, significant improvements in arrests and mortality have been described worldwide, yet children still experience preventable deterioration outside the ICU at many hospitals.
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is the most common malignancy in children. Although 5 years event-free survival rates reach 90%, some children still succumb to the disease and others achieve cure with significant late effects. Improving on this will require alternative treatments. This Grand Round will describe new options for refractory disease, and discuss some of the ethical aspects of embarking on these new treatment options.
Variation in care has been long recognised and is often a part of good clinical practice. However, sometimes variation in care is unwarranted and can lead to variation in quality of care and increased costs. The inaugural Australian Atlas of Variation in Healthcare will be launched later this month by the federal minister for health, Susan Ley. Harriet Hiscock will present data on variation in care for some of the paediatric conditions included in the Atlas and discuss reasons why such variation might be occurring.
