Australia’s hospital and health care system is one of the best in the world – when it comes to helping people recover from acute disease, we excel. But there’s an area in which we’re lacking and that’s the treatment of chronic disease in the elderly. People are suffering unnecessarily from conditions such as pneumonia, urinary tract infections, pressure sores and delirium, conditions that often simply fall under the barrier of geriatric conditions when they could, in fact, be preventable with the right level of care. Those most at risk are often the patients who are most vulnerable – elderly people with dementia or with complex chronic conditions, who are older or frailer and often unable to speak up for themselves.

This project hopes to improve the analysis and accuracy in evaluating the care outcomes of these patients, to better inform policy and ensure the right level of funding and support is given to the people who need it the most.

The Background

A registered nurse, Dr Kasia Bail moved into academia in 2007, but has continued clinical nursing on a casual basis, where she’s seen first-hand the problems in the system she hopes to improve with her research.

Having completed her PhD, in which she’s identified the cost of complications related to nursing care and argued that the focus on curative disease and progress through the system means the care of the elderly and vulnerable is being rationed, Kasia’s focus now is on working out how to better use the masses of data already collected and refine the methods used to make it more useful in forming policy decisions about care.

“What's happening is these core complications such as pneumonia and UTIs are being used as indicators of whether to fund or not fund hospitals, so we need better information and better accuracy and we want the nurses – who know what's happening clinically – to do that, not just bean counters,” she says.

Pitch For Funds

Pitch for Funds was a recent event held by the University of Canberra, in which 17 researchers pitched their research ideas for a chance to win a share of $7,000 in prize money. Kasia’s persuasive pitch raised $1,556.88 towards her project but she is hoping for $7,000 to get the ball rolling so please dig deep and donate. She admits that aged care is a cause that doesn’t necessarily win a lot of sympathy, but it’s one that most of our relatives – and indeed, ourselves – will face in the future and with an ageing population, support and action is more critical than ever.

Kasia’s project will focus on two main areas, firstly getting an analysis done on data collected on the nursing workforce and secondly, comparing the analytical approach she used to report on core complications in her PhD with the condition onset flags currently being used.

“We know condition onset flags are an under-representation of what’s occurring and my method is potentially an over-representation, so we need to combine the two and really refine the science,” she says. “Better accuracy of this analysis approach means we can better inform the decisions that the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and the Independent Hospital Pricing Authority is making about whether these complications should be funded or not.”