The Bendigo Family Study is now recruiting....

Welcome from the Bendigo Family Study. This week we commence recruitment.  

The Bendigo Family Study is Australia's largest tri-generational study of rural healthcare. Our team, lead by Clinical Professor Julie Quinlivan and associate investigators Dr Rodney Petersen, Dr Nicola Yuen, Dr Aimee Waegele, Dr Adela Lourensz, Dr Emma Adams and Dr Yong Shi Zhang will be exploring how we can improve healthcare outcomes for rural Australians. 

Rural health services face unique challenges relating to distance and availability of healthcare personnel that are not faced by metropolitan health services. A detailed snapshot of the rural experience of new families can help identify issues and lead to service improvements.

This snapshot study will focus on several key themes:

1.     Access to information
How do rural families access information about healthcare concerns and the availability of services. Are they able to access reliable information from healthcare professionals or do they rely on the internet or friends and family? How does anxiety or distance play a role in access? We will be replicating an innovative international study to explore how the internet is changing the healthcare landscape.

2.     Prepared for care
Do rural women presenting for maternity care arrive in a timely manner with all relevant investigations completed so care can be optimally advanced? Commonwealth and State governments regularly review the recommended antenatal investigations for normal pregnancy. Observational experience suggests that many pregnant women presenting for hospital care have not had the recommended investigations, and in other cases, have had investigations not recommended for care. Presenting to hospital with optimal investigation is a key measure of the quality of healthcare. We will use pregnancy as the model to evaluate how prepared rural Australians are for hospital care.

3.   Prepared for discharge
The length of stay in hospital is falling as efficiencies in care ensure streamlined checks for safe discharge. However, rural families may be discharged to remote locations where a lack of access to local services may impact on patient's confidence to access care. We will be evaluating preparedness for hospital discharge using new parents and babies as the model. New families share concerns of all patients leaving hospital, and also have additional concerns relating to the role of being parent to a newborn. Common unique concerns centre around access to postnatal midwifery, child health, breastfeeding, postpartum physical and mental health services. We will be exploring how to improve preparedness for  discharge.  

4. Managing chronic disease in the community in diverse multigenerational families.
Many studies look at a patient with a chronic disease in isolation, when management of chronic disease is affected by wider family and community circumstances. We will explore chronic disease management in rural Australia by taking a tri-generational approach and integrate newborn, parenting and grandparent outcomes to see how well we are supporting our rural families.

5. Other subsidiary studies
Our study will also explore attitudes to topical areas in medicine and focus on the emerging areas of genetic testing, the move to a society that seeks answers through the internet, and living with chronic disease.

Our team will commence recruiting this week and we plan to formally launch our study in June 2024. If you would like to be involved then please don't hesitate to reach out to one of our team.

Regards
Professor Julie Quinlivan
Chief investigator Bendigo Family Study