Great news as our study T-shirts were delivered from the printers.

Next to be printed will be all our questionnaires for new mums, partners and grandparents, along with their consent forms. We will also be printing our advertising posters.

We are also finalising our data set for entering study data.

We hope to start with a few pilot recruits in the next month before a formal launch and our main recruitment drive commences.

Best wishes
Professor Julie Quinlivan
Chief investigator

Great news!

The Bendigo Family Study has received ethics approval from the Victorian Government Bendigo Health Service ethics committee. We are now arranging to print our team T shirts and our consent forms, posters and questionnaires ready to launch and start recruiting.   

Our offical ethics approval code is Bendigo Family Study
103372 HREC/103372/BH-2024-417877(v3)

The Bendigo Family study is unique as it will address trigenerational family health from new borns, parents and grandparents to create a snap shot of family life in rural Australia. We are covering many areas of health and social wellbeing, including pregnancy care, mental health, parenting, enhancing hospital care and managing chronic diseases in rural Australia. We hope our results will achieve service improvements for rural Australians.

Bendigo is a great place to centre this study. Bendigo is the fourth-largest inland city in Australia and the fourth-most populous city in Victoria according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendigo). It has an important history in agricultural sheep industry and the gold rush era of Australia and is a long standing important region for the traditional owners of the area who are the Dja Dja Wurrung (Djaara) people.. It is one of Australia's great inland historic cities.

Please become involved in this study. Enrole as a participant or consider helping to advocate and advertise the study to your community.

Look out for our study launch next Month!

Professor Julie Quinlivan
​Bendigo Family Study lead investigator

The Bendigo Family Study has now been registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials registry with the number ACTRN12624000240549p

We have submitted our trial for ethics review and are in the process of designing our promotional materials. We hope to commence recruiting in the middle of the year.

In the next series of posts we plan to provide more information on each of our planned subsidiary studies. 

​We also recently presented findings from our Australian Fathers Study in Christchurch NZ and the key findings indicated that new fathers experience postnatal depression at similar rates to those seen in new mothers. We plan to explore this same concern in our rural cohort of new fathers in Bendigo, who may also face issues with distance and lack of access to care.

​If you are interested in reading more about our Australian Fathers Study then visit our website at  https://www.australianfathersstudy.com/

Professor Julie Quinlivan
​Lead investigator Bendigo Family Study