Our monthly sessions focus on a different topic within Health Services Research & Implementation Science (HSRIS) for a diverse audience of researchers, clinicians, and quality managers. These sessions seek to describe different methodologies that can be used to investigate HSRIS questions and feature expert presenters, early career researchers and PhD candidates.
Our first session provides an overview of HSRIS, with an introduction to Health Services Research presented by the Department’s Lead Professor Karin Thursky, and an introduction to Implementation Science from Associate Professor Stephanie Best. PhD candidate Rebecca Purvis from the Parkville Familial Cancer Centre and Genomic Medicine discusses her work titled "How do we implement polygenic scores for cancer risk assessment in clinical genetics?"
The spotlight is now focused on Survivorship, a team within HSR whose research aims to better understand the issues that survivors experience and their needs, and aims to develop and test interventions to improve survivors' wellbeing. The Survivorship program lead Professor Michael Jefford kicks off the session presenting recent findings into major factors that influence variation in experience of people affected by cancer. Dr Karolina Lisy presents her work ‘A Qualitative Study of the Cancer Survivorship Experiences of Trans and Gender Diverse Australians, and Professor Vicki White (Deakin University) discusses the disparities in quality of life, social distress and employment outcomes in Australian cancer survivors.
Our first international speaker, Dr Michael Halpern from National Cancer Institute (USA) presented on the topic ‘Patient Experience of care: what it is, how it is assessed, and why it matters,’ which sought to discuss each of these questions using several examples from clinical research. Dr Julia Lai-Kwon, a Medical Oncologist and Health Services Researcher at Peter Mac, presented an outline of her PhD exploring the co-design of an electronic patient-reported symptom (ePROs) monitoring system for people receiving immunotherapy, which seeks to involve consumers in the development of a platform that allows people with cancer to easily monitor, identify, and update their clinically-significant symptoms between visits. Finally, we heard from Ms Holly Chung, a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher with the Academic Nursing Unit and Department of Health Services Research at Peter Mac. Ms Chung presented on her work ‘Listening to What Matters Most: working with people with myeloma to select a suite of PROMs feasible to measure Quality of Life.’
In this session we will hear from Health Services Research member Associate Professor Karla Gough who presents her and Ally Drosdowsky’s work examining ‘Inclusion and representative diversity in psychological intervention trials for cancer patients.’ Dr Lisa Guccione, also from the Health Services Research in the Implementation Science team discusses ‘Understanding how to improve the use of advance care planning for all patient populations.’ Finally, from the Burnett Institute and the Austin Hospital, Professor Margaret Hellard addresses the concept of Missing Voices by questioning: are they missing or are we not listening or not asking? Professor Hellard describes her valuable research into Hepatitis C and working with people who inject drugs.
Dr Sabine Deij, Health Economics program lead in the Department of Health Services Research provides a sound overview of Health Economics and its applications in research. Dr Lara Petelin from The Daffodil Centre presents on Modelling and Cost-Effectiveness and the University of Melbourne’s Dr Michelle Tew discusses the incorporation of future medical costs in cost-effectiveness analysis.
Health Services Researcher’s Ms Holly Chung and Ms Amelia Hyatt co-presented on their findings from ‘Social Return on Investment: Economic Evaluation of Supportive Care for Lung Cancer Patients in Acute Care Settings in Australia,’ which seeks to holistically assess and quantify the social and environmental value of a program, in addition to its economic viability using Cost-Benefit Analysis. We then heard from Associate Professor Ilias Goranitis from the Centre for Health Policy at the University of Melbourne, who is the Health Economics Lead of Australian Genomics. Associate Professor Goranitis presented on the topic ‘Discrete Choice Experiments in Genomic Medicine,’ exploring the use of Health Economics to inform service design in the context of genomic medicine.
Returning to the world of Health Economics, we now hear about the Health Technology Assessment Review from Professor Richard De Abreu Lourenco (Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE), University of Technology Sydney). Associate Professor Gabrielle Haeusler (Royal Children's Hospital, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, National Centre for Infections in Cancer, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre) describes her work in cost-effectiveness, exploring the implementation of home-based care in carefully selected paediatric febrile neutropenia patients. Finally, a co-presentation from Dr Dylan Mordaunt (SA Health, University of Melbourne) and Francisco Santos Gonzalez (Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne - PhD candidate) explores micro-costing methodologies and their application to genomics.
This session explores the use of large-scale clinical data to inform research outcomes. Hear from Clinical Haematologist and the Health Services Research Clinical informatics lead Dr Ashley Ng, Dr Vlada Rozova who discusses the use of natural language processing to extract information from medical data, and Associate Professor Daniel Capurro from the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems and Deputy-director of the Centre for the Digital Transformation of Health.
To showcase some of our current Allied Health Research projects, this session features presentations from five Allied Health Researchers in a rapid fire format! Each of our speakers presented for 5-10 minutes about their work, giving viewers a taste of the diverse impact and outcomes Allied Health researchers can have in reducing the impact of cancer. In this session you will hear from Ms Jenelle Loeliger – an Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian and joint manager of the Nutrition and Speech Pathology Departments, Dr Susan Dragon – Research Portfolio Lead within Social Work at Peter Mac, Dr Jacqui Frowen – Clinical Lead of Speech Pathology, Ms Amy Bowman – Senior Clinical Physiotherapist, Clinical Educator and Allied Health Informatician, and Ms Celia Marston – Clinical Lead for Occupational Therapy.