Campus Mental Health Strategy: How mental health is your business

From 2021-2026, the Melbourne Children’s Campus Mental Health Strategy has lived and breathed the key message: “mental health is everyone’s business”. A part of our mission was to change conversations across campus about mental health and wellbeing, drawing on all kinds of expertise. Whether it was researchers, educators, clinicians, support staff, or the voices of people with lived and living experience, including children, young people, and families.

International Women’s Day 2026: Balance the Scales

Please join us for a thought-provoking International Women’s Day (IWD) Grand Round panel discussion with four exceptional women. As we continue to strive for gender equality and economic empowerment for women and girls, we will explore how best to invest in women and promote women in leadership, taking into account the impacts of the pandemic, with a focus on storytelling and learning from each other.

Hopkins Symposium: Childhood Dementia: Empowering unified efforts to address unmet needs

Childhood dementia is a collective term for over 100 neurodegenerative disorders that begin in childhood or adolescence, each marked by progressive cognitive decline. Most are rare or ultra-rare monogenic disorders with a combined birth frequency estimated at greater than 1 in 2,900 births. Despite their significant impact, fewer than 5% of these conditions have effective treatments and Australian health systems face significant challenges in meeting the complex and critical needs of affected patients and their families.

Adaptive platform trials for rare disease populations

BANDICOOT is an international adaptive platform trial (APT) designed to identify effective therapies that improve health outcomes for critically ill children receiving a haematopoetic stem cell transplant (HCT). Building
on extensive engagement with patients, their parents, and clinicians, we will launch 3 trial domains focused on exercise, nutritional supplementation, and the gut microbiome

To prevent the unpredictable

Mental health risk assessments have always been a challenge, even for the most experienced clinicians. Risk assessment involves understanding not just the severity of the reported symptoms but the underlying motivations and the psychosocial circumstances. 

Vaccine preventable diseases in 2025: Learning from the past and looking forward

Immunisations are one of the world’s greatest public health interventions, and also one of the areas of medicine increasingly susceptible to misinformation. Independent, evidence-based scientific advice to governments and the community is crucial in informing immunisation policy and appropriate utilisation and uptake of safe and effective vaccines.

Getting your heart dirty: A toolkit for clinicians working with children with severe neurological impairment

Advances in medical care and changes in societal expectations have resulted in different patterns of survival for children and adolescents with severe neurological disability. Increased longevity, new and unseen multi-morbidity, and access to an increasing array of new and often invasive interventions offers significant decision-making challenges to children, parents, and clinicians. Sometimes it is not clear if we are helping or harming.