In this interactive and case-based session, the Children’s Bioethics Centre team will introduce the ethical idea of deciding with children, rather than ‘for’ them. We will briefly describe the ethical foundations of this idea, discuss what it means in practice, and why it matters.
A Stepped Care Approach to Developmental Care is a Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation funded project which aims to ensure that children referred with a developmental concern are seen by the right person in the right place at the right time. To achieve this a new Allied Health centralised intake team apply a stepped approach that identifies the child’s needs and pathway.
The Complex Movement Disorders program at the Royal Children’s Hospital commenced in 1997 and has evolved since then. It is currently funded by RCH Foundation and the fundraising efforts of A/Prof Andrew Kornberg’s Fly for the Kids event in 2017. The program allows coordinated multidisciplinary assessment and management of children with movement disorders and associated neurodevelopmental comorbidities.
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.
The Kidney Flagship is an RCH Foundation funded project which aims to reduce the burden of genetic kidney disease on patients and their families by improving diagnosis, treatment and developing new targeted therapies. In this Grand Rounds we will show how our work has already impacted on the care of children with kidney disease and our plans for the future.
It is World Pneumonia Day on November 12th. Pneumonia and other acute lower respiratory infections remain the most common causes of childhood death, and illness requiring hospitalization globally. This is despite the effective pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) being widely available, which points to the varied causation of childhood pneumonia in 2020.
RCH is excited to be celebrating Allied Health Professionals Day on 14 October 2020. Allied Health Professionals Day first began in the UK in 2018 and has since become an international event to recognise and celebrate the Allied Health Professional community.
Vernon Collins Oration 2020
Championing child rights amidst the chaos of COVID-19
Professor Elizabeth Elliott, AM
The Consultative Council on Obstetric and Paediatric Mortality and Morbidity (CCOPMM) monitors the causes and factors involved in all child deaths throughout Victoria, and provides recommendations to Government, health care professionals and the community. In recent years the Council has identified the social and economic gradient in risk of child deaths, which includes virtually all causes, from accidental trauma, drowning, SIDS, infections and chronic illnesses. The Council has long recommended improvements in the systems for provision of child welfare and support to families who are vulnerable, especially families of children with chronic illness, and these needs are magnified in the COVID-19 pandemic era.
There has in recent years been a rapid increase in the number and complexity of clinical trials and novel therapies for neurogenetic conditions. Many of these conditions are individually rare, but their impact upon affected children and their families may be very severe. While the increasing awareness and availability of new treatments brings great hope and excitement for all involved in care of these children, it also presents significant challenges for clinicians and for patients and their families.
