industry & policy
What are some of the key changes GEDI has brought about for elderly patients and the staff who care for them ? One of the big outcome measures , if you like , for emergency departments , is how many people wait for more than four hours to receive medical care .
In addition , obviously emergency departments are supposed to be efficient and cost-effective , so in our research we have looked at these kinds of hospital markers of outcomes . Are we getting people through the system quickly and efficiently and getting them to see the medical care that they need , and are we doing it in a way that is , at the very worst , cost-neutral and hopefully cost-saving ?
Of course , from the patient ’ s point of view , are we doing this in a way that they are satisfied with this and it doesn ’ t mean they keep bouncing back to hospital ?
With the GEDI , with this focus on this particularly vulnerable population of frail elderly people , we are seeing improvements in hospital efficiency and cost-effectiveness , but also we ’ re beginning to see great outcomes from patients as well . They ’ re actually spending less time waiting and they ’ re returning to hospital less frequently .
However , these are only preliminary results , and our final research won ’ t be available until early in 2017 .
You ’ ve received state funding to have the program rolled out on a wider scale . What are the next steps there , and how can other organisations be involved ? When we have got the final results and we are sure that this is a cost-efficient and effective service , we will be working with Queensland Health on a dissemination project . This is where we will actually send to emergencies departments a toolkit that we are developing that will be able to be disseminated to Queensland Health facilities , Queensland Health emergency departments , that will have everything : all the paperwork they need , all the strategies they need , where the funding needs to come from , and how to approach this .
We ’ re also working on a bigger toolkit that can be applied to non- Queensland Health facilities , and we hope eventually to get some sort of funding to actually run facilitation programs . Because it ’ s not just about having all the right pieces of paper and all of the processes that you can tick a box . It ’ s actually about having clinicians with the right skills and attitudes and enthusiasms as well .
GEDI is part of a larger project , CEDRiC , or Care Coordination through Emergency Department Residential Aged Care and Primary Health Collaboration . The initiative aims to improve interaction between aged-care facilities and hospitals . How ’ s the wider project been going ? It ’ s going really well . As you rightly say , GEDI is one aspect of that . Actually , the GEDI program deals not just with people coming in from aged care , but any frail , older person , whether they live at home or in a residential aged-care facility . But the CEDRiC project is particularly looking at improving care for people in residential aged care .
We have developed the role of the nurse practitioner candidate – a program to train nurse practitioners to work in the residential aged-care facility .
We will be analysing the results of that aspect of the CEDRiC project early in [ 2017 ]. We hope that by about February we will be able to report the results .
Our preliminary analysis is showing that , generally , we ’ re getting some very good qualitative outcomes . People are very happy and satisfied with the services , and we just want to crunch the numbers to make sure that it ’ s also efficient and cost-effective . ■
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