As we emerge from COVID-19, Monash Partners is focused on research relating to its impact and contributing to the redesign and improvement of Victoria’s healthcare system to support a strong recovery.
The pandemic has provided an unprecedented window of opportunity for reform, including retaining and building on pandemic-driven innovations in service models and system design, and the opportunity to leverage the learnings from the COVID-19 emergency response to date to ensure we are able to mitigate the near and long-term effects.
Together with the Victorian State government, Monash Partners alongside the Melbourne Academic Centre for Health (MACH) and Western Alliance have formed a collaboration named the Victorian Collaborative Healthcare Recovery Initiative (VCHRI), to lead initiatives that accelerate the translation of research into clinical care and deliver improved health outcomes post COVID-19.
This is underpinned by the Monash Partners Learning Health System, with key learnings informing change to optimise best practice.
Stage one involved engaging our health service leads, community, theme executives and government on priority areas. It also involved greater access to data in partnership with government.
Community feedback on priorities for our healthcare system post COVID-19 saw GP telehealth top the list of what people wanted to keep following the pandemic (72 per cent).
To assist practitioners and patients navigate this new form of healthcare, Monash Partners has developed a dedicated telehealth knowledge hub providing links to extensive information, training tools, legal considerations, exemplars, and publications related to telehealth. This is supported by VCHRI.
Stage two involved two projects:
- Optimising high value care – Supporting hospitals to optimise colonoscopy best practice, led by Associate Professor Denise O’Connor, and
- Optimising telehealth/virtual care, led at Monash Partners by Professor Terry Haines.
Both are underway and are being expanded into partnership and MRFF funding proposals.
Monash Partners is proud to be involved in this reform and recovery plan, restoring systems and services and working to improve performance and sustainability post pandemic. We are evaluating and refining our co-developed Learning Health System through these and other projects contributing to our mandate to drive Rapid Applied Research Translation.
Stay safe,
Professor Helena Teede AM
