People centred solutions

We are developing ways to support other primary healthcare workers to ease the pressure on doctors who are in scarce supply in many parts of the world.

In India, a program has proved very successful, for example, in training community health workers  to help people with heart disease or diabetes to take medication and monitor their health.

In Australia we are working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, policy makers, burn clinicians and a multidisciplinary team to develop transformational models of care  that address cultural safety and focus on high quality, patient centred care.

In India, we are working with actors across the system from policy makers to care providers, addressing barriers to ongoing care for burns . We also stress the importance of going beyond the health system, taking an inter-sectoral approach, to address equity, gender, human rights and social determinants of health, to improve recovery outcomes for burns survivors.

The Community-Eye-Care (C-EYE-C) initiative in Westmead Hospital is an optometrist led triage clinic for two common chronic eye diseases - glaucoma and diabetic eye disease. This new model of care has demonstrated cost savings to the health system and reduced waiting time for outpatient appointments with an ophthalmologist in the hospital eye clinic.

We also work in a cross-disciplinary way improving how people analyse and share health information. People make significant healthcare decisions based on what they read in newspapers or see on television and therefore it is important that health journalism and communications are evidence-based. To help with this we’ve developed a toolkit for journalism students that aims to improve critical appraisal skills. The toolkit has been piloted in India  and recently introduced in China.