The exit strategy for COVID-19 is a vaccine. To stop this pandemic we may need to vaccinate a significant proportion of the entire global population of 7 billion people. Where are we up to with vaccine development? Who gets vaccinated? How to communicate the benefits of a novel, fast tracked vaccine when misinformation is already spreading.
COVID-19 has resulted in a flurry of high-stakes decision-making, at a public health level and an individual patient level, with significant impacts on how children are cared for, and how staff work. Many of these decisions have ethical dimensions.
COVID-19 is almost always a mild disease in children. Adults are much more likely to become very unwell or die than children. Why is this so?
Data from around the world consistently shows that COVID-19 is essentially a mild disease in children. However, the indirect effects of COVID-19 may have a more profound effect than the direct effects of the infection.
We will hear from 3 speakers on the global and clinical aspects, and the broader social, education and wellbeing impact of COVID-19 on children.
Social media holds considerable potential for health promotion activities, as it addresses some of the barriers in traditional methods of health communication by increasing accessibility, interaction and engagement with the community. Now in its fourth year, the RCH National Child Health Poll has evolved to increasingly use novel and innovative strategies to engage parents and carers via RCH digital channels.
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.
GenV’s vision is to help solve complex issues affecting today’s children and adults through an entire Australian state becoming a single platform that enhances research speed, capacity and translation. Led from the Melbourne Children’s Campus, the GenV Cohort will be open to the families of all 170,000 Victorian newborns over 2021-2. At its foundation are consent; existing geospatial, clinical and administrative data; biosamples; GenV-specific data; and melding observational and intervention design
Widening health inequities, emerging disease threats, and shortfalls in financing for health are challenging the gains made in global health over the past 20 years. Many countries face a ‘triple transition’: Epidemiologically – from infectious to chronic diseases; Financially – from donor to domestic financing of health, and Structurally – as health systems reorganise to achieve universal health coverage. Dr Stephanie Williams will provide an overview of Australia’s global health contribution with practical examples of how the aid program is adapting to these changes.
Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) have been used for decades in clinical trials, observational studies, population health surveys, and for estimates of quality of life in economic evaluations. However, the use of PROs as part of routine measurement in clinical settings is relatively new. In this Grand Round, 3 speakers will discuss the use of PROs in the UK, in mental health at RCH and integrating PROs into the EMR.
One of the growing worldwide challenges in paediatric health care is how to understand and respond to some of the many ways in which families of sick children use social media. This presentation draws together a number of strands of thought from my recent sabbatical in the UK, where the paediatric hospital staff are still experiencing the flow-on effects of the high-profile (and high-conflict) social media campaigns run by parents of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans. I will present some data from two recent studies of how families in UK and Australia use social media, especially crowd-funding, and then raise for discussion some of the ethical and social challenges arising from social media use.
