This project will design a comprehensive intervention to improve prevention of liver cancer in people living with chronic viral hepatitis. Read more. Ethics approval for this project was granted by Melbourne Health Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref No 2021.231)

General practice is a critical point of immunisation against COVID19 for a large proportion of the Australian population. This project will benefit GPs, PHNs, the community cared for by them, and the health system by helping to identify unsafe vaccines as early as possible and providing confidence vaccine safety is being closely monitored. Ethics approval for this project was granted by Monash Health Human Ethics Research Committee Ref No RES-18-0000-232A)

Australia has the 8th highest opioid prescribing rate in the world. Mortality from pharmaceutical opioids has doubled over the last decade. There is an urgent need to better understand opioid use patterns, outcomes and detection of harms. Researchers will use Aurora data to better understand opioid use patterns, identify risk areas around opioid supply and analyse the impacts of opioid-related policy decisions on prescribing. Ethics approval for this project was granted by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref No: 24139)

Researchers from Summer Foundation (a leading research and support organisation working to increase accessible housing for young people with disability) will lead an exciting project to conduct a three-way privacy-protecting linkage between general practice, the hospital setting and the National Disability Insurance Agency. The primary outcome is to better understand the pattern of health service use by National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants and to develop interventions to ensure equitable access to healthcare initiatives by people with disability. Ethics approval for this study was granted by Eastern Health Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref No E20/001/58261)

Common respiratory and gastrointestinal infections cause significant childhood illness in community, general practice and hospital settings.

The project aims to:

1. Create SNOTWATCH- a service mapping respiratory and gastrointestinal results in Victoria for clinicians and consumers to use to see current local activity in their area
2. Use these results from the past to estimate the contribution each organism makes in the burden of childhood illness and health-care utilisation. This will help provide the evidence for supporting treatment and vaccine decision making as well as identifying predictable patterns of spread to provide an early warning system for the future.

Ethics approval for this project was granted by Monash Health Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref No RES-19-0000-312A)

Low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide and in Australia accounts for over $4.8 billion spent on treatments. Patients with low back pain often receive low-value care that is not supported by evidence with a 25% increase in hospitalisations for low back pain in the past 10 years.

This study will trial a media-led intervention that includes evidence-based information on the management of low back pain (LBP), distributed and broadcasted at point-of-care in general practices, to change patient beliefs about LBP. Effectiveness will be measured in terms of patients’ beliefs and attitudes about LBP. Additionally, the study will evaluate the delivery of care at a practice level to determine if the media-led intervention leads to changes in  practice (i.e., prescriptions for opioid medication, referrals for medical imaging and Specialists).

The study has ethics approval from Northern Sydney Local Health District Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref: 2022/ETH01928).

One in four adults aged >40 will develop Atrial Fibrillation (AF) in their lifetime. It is an important health problem associated with a 5-fold increase in stroke, more often disabling or fatal. While AF may give rise to palpitations or other symptoms, there are frequently none, especially in older people with the highest risk of stroke. The primary objective of this study is to determine if screening for AF is effective at reducing stroke (both ischaemic and haemorrhagic) compared to usual care and to quantify other potential benefits and harms of screening. Ethics approval for this project was granted by The University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref No 2021/825)

A list of publications to date is available here.