2024 Strategic Innovation Program Recipients

Ebony Lewis is an early career researcher and an Indigenous Scientia Lecturer in the School of Population Health at the University of New South Wales. Her research over the past few years has focused on improving the end-of-life care experience for older adults, caregivers and clinicians and culturally appropriate approaches to the assessment and management of frailty to support health and wellbeing in later life.

Co-designing and piloting a theory-informed, evidence-based intervention to minimise social frailty in carers of people in later life

Social frailty threatens healthy ageing, particularly for carers. This research aims to co-create and pilot test a tailored intervention prototype aimed at minimising the adverse impact of social frailty in older carers. This will include identifying the barriers to social fulfillment among carers. It will also explore how social barriers are associated with social frailty and what influence these deficits have on a carer’s capacity for care provision to determine the impact of the intervention on health, psychological and social outcomes for both carers and the frail older person. Outcomes of the study will support development of a theory informed social frailty intervention model.

Award: $24,371.58

Dr Jennifer Jones is a clinician researcher and educator in her roles as a Lecturer at The University of Melbourne and a Physiotherapist at Austin Health. Dr Jones leads a program of research in frailty and digital health as an early career researcher. The focus of Dr Jones’ health services research is predicting discharge home and recovery of people admitted to hospital with frailty using electronic medical record data. The vision of Dr Jones’ research program is to ultimately guide the delivery of targeted health care interventions and improve health outcomes of people in hospital with frailty using these predictions.

"When can I go home?" Predicting discharge home from hospital for people with frailty

Electronic Medical Records provide the opportunity to harness technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness of care from the data-enriched hospital environments. This project brings together a team of experts in health, research, data, and frailty (including people with lived experience) from The University of Melbourne and Austin Health who have the expertise to co-develop and deliver cutting edge technology to rapidly digest clinical information using artificial intelligence. The project aims to provide an effective clinical decision support tool to assist health professionals, increase hospital efficiency, and maximise patient time at home.

Award: $25,000