Pharmacy Daily | Quality of care tools

A FLINDERS University team led by Prof Julie Ratcliffe will focus on enhancing healthcare quality for older Australians.

Building on their successes in aged care, Ratcliffe's team will develop tools to measure the quality of care older people receive in hospitals and other clinical settings.

"Quality improvement efforts within healthcare are urgently needed for older people, whose voices are often unheard," said Ratcliffe.

She highlighted that the current tools were found to be inadequate for systematic monitoring and reporting of older adults' care experiences.

With nearly $3 million in funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council's Investigator Grant Scheme, the team aims to develop and validate new measures for 'Quality of Life and Quality of Care' experiences, reduce reliance on proxy assessors, and empower cognitively impaired older adults to self-assess.

The project titled, 'New Health Economic Tools for Improving the Health and Wellbeing of Older Australians', will also adapt Ratcliffe's nationally implemented 'Quality of Life and Quality of Care' tools, initially developed for aged care, to clinical settings like hospitals.

Flinders University Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Prof Raymond Chan praised Ratcliffe's internationally recognised work, noting, "this grant will allow her to build on her success in aged care and apply her expertise to our healthcare system".