• Project status: Complete
Mother and daughter bonding

Refugee background families are at greater risk of poor health outcomes given their experience of trauma, torture and the challenges of settling into a new country. 

We are a partnership program that brings together health service clinicians and managers, policy makers and researchers to bring about sustainable improvements in the quality of maternity and early childhood health care to improve health and health care outcomes for families of refugee background.

We are a partnership program that brings together health service clinicians and managers, policy makers and researchers to bring about sustainable improvements in the quality of maternity and early childhood health care to improve health and health...

We are a partnership program that brings together health service clinicians and managers, policy makers and researchers to bring about sustainable improvements in the quality of maternity and early childhood health care to improve health and health care outcomes for families of refugee background.

Overview

btg logo

The Bridging the Gap partnership formed in recognition that refugee background families are at greater risk of poor health outcomes given their experience of trauma and torture and the challenges in settling in a new country. Universal health systems face difficulties in ensuring their services are accessible and responsive to the needs of refugee background families.

Our vision

The Bridging the Gap partners have developed a vision for what they would like to achieve to improve health and health care for families.

Women & families who feel:

  • Respected and treated with dignity
  • Engaged and confident
  • Safe
  • Their experience & needs are understood & valued
  • They can communicate and be heard

Services that are:

  • Welcoming
  • Responsive
  • Connected and well integrated
  • Seamless
  • Flexible
  • Family centred
  • Multidisciplinary

Workers who are:

  • Knowledgeable
  • Sensitive
  • Culturally aware
  • Well supported

The program includes multiple quality improvement projects that are being implemented in four maternity hospitals (Western Health and Monash Health) and two local government maternal and child health services (Cities of Wyndham and Greater Dandenong) with an evaluation of process and outcomes occurring concurrently.

Together, the partnership has been developing projects that will lead to:

  • earlier and better identification of families of refugee background
  • opportunities for clinicians and front-line staff to build their understanding of the refugee experience through training and professional development
  • building system capacity to support families in accessing care, including the provision of language services
  • greater continuity of care for families of refugee background
  • alternative ways of providing clinical care and health education that engage bicultural workers and interpreters
  • enhanced health literacy
  • improved linkages and referral systems between health and local support service providers
  • community engagement in service planning
  • more seamless, integrated care across maternity and early childhood health services.

pdsa2Program profile

Bridging the Gap quality improvement initiatives are many and varied and run simultaneously. Projects are co-designed by the partners using evidence to inform planning, with quality improvement activity implemented using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) framework.

PDSA is a pragmatic method for implementing and testing iterative changes through small rapid cycles of improvement with flexibility to adapt change according to feedback. 

Bridging the Gap has developed on the premise that individual care providers are best enabled to provide quality care with knowledge, skills and systems in place that support them to do so. We highlight several demonstration and quality improvement projects below.

Our projects

child in hospital

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