Elderly and Vulnerable Populations pillar

Our vision is to work with various governmental, health, university, and international partners to investigate ways to improve care delivery, especially for vulnerable population groups who present to the emergency department.

Since 2014, we have received grants from various funding sources including:

• the National Health and Medical Research Council
• Department of Social Services
• the Emergency Medicine Foundation
• Gold Coast Hospital Foundation
• Griffith University
• Healthcare Improvement Unit (Clinical Excellence Queensland).

Several Griffith University students have also engaged in research within our pillar.

Our pillar aims to:

• undertake emergency care research important to clinicians, health service managers and policy makers
• build research capacity by providing opportunities for clinicians, students and academics to be involved in emergency care research
• promote the excellence, relevance and impact of our research
• sustain and strengthen our research network through local, state, national and international collaborations.

The current research themes within our pillar include to:

• understand, inform and evaluate service improvements for vulnerable populations such as paediatrics, older people, people with mental health problems, and people arriving to the Emergency Department by police
• evaluate out-of-hospital models of care that aim to improve emergency service delivery for vulnerable populations
• describe the impact on emergency department presentations from new, or changes made to, government policy.

We have undertaken research with various governmental, health, university and international collaborators, such as:

• Abu Dhabi Health Service, UAE
• Bond University
• CSIRO
• Griffith University
• Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
• The University of Melbourne
• The University of Queensland
• Uppsala University, Sweden
• Queensland Ambulance Service
• Queensland Police Service

We have also collaborated with various private and public health services within Queensland.