Collaboration between a public and a private early parenting centre to reduce social disadvantage though continuous quality improvement

Collaboration between a public and a private early parenting centre to reduce social disadvantage though continuous quality improvement

We successfully implemented an electronic patient reported outcome system for Ramsay Healthcare’s Masada Private Hospital Early Parenting Centre (MPHEPC). This allows Ramsay Health Care to measure program impact including on maternal mental health and infant settling and sleeping behaviour.

We aim to take these learnings to Tresillian Family Centre’s Nepean Residential Service. It is a publicly funded EPC serving families with considerable psychosocial and economic vulnerabilities located in Western Sydney. At present this service doesn’t collect routine pre-admission or outcome data electronically from women and infants admitted to the residential program who are often experiencing complex coincidental adversity.

We are forming a new research collaboration of clinical staff from Tresillian Family Centre and MPHEPC to review the data collected routinely at Masada EPC and reduce any redundancies or unused data fields, identify any missing information relevant to clinical care, adapt forms for the Tresillian setting, and implement the revised forms with consecutive cohorts of women admitted to both services in a six-month period. We will analyse the data to identify characteristics of women and infants who experience improvements at each site and those for whom current service provision is insufficient. We will identify potential service enhancements to address unmet needs.