Let's get started: The Bendigo Family Study

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The Bendigo Family Study will be one of Australia's largest tri-generational studies into rural families with our focus extending from newborns, to their parents and grandparents.

We are keen to improve the delivery of services to Australian rural communities and have selected the fabulous City of Bendigo as our base. Our research team consists of six local clinicians and a research expert. 

Rural health services face unique challenges relating to distance and availability of healthcare personnel that are not faced by metropolitan health services. Our detailed snapshot of rural health will be adopting a tri-generational focus to help identify key issues in rural healthcare delivery with the aim to achieve service improvements.

Within the Bendigo Family Study project we have four major sub-studies. These are:
1. Access to healthcare information.
2. Prepared for parenting.
3. Prepared for hospital discharge.
4. Managing chronic disease in our community.
We also have other pre-planned subsidiary studies to explore attitudes and advances in healthcare.

​Our study will focus on new and growing families by recruiting new mothers who have just delivered a baby, and via these mothers, invite extended family members (being their partner and a grandparent) to participate in a survey. Our target is 1500 individuals from 500 families.

We have now completed consultation and have our questionnaires finalised. The next step is to secure independent ethical review of the project and trial registration. We will be registering this study in the Australian and New Zealand Clinical trials system.

​More soon...