Bridging the Gap: Partnerships for change in refugee child and family health

Project status: Complete

Research area: Population Health > Intergenerational Health

The Bridging the Gap Partnership aimed to improve health and healthcare outcomes for families of refugee background.

The project brought together health service clinicians and managers, policymakers and researchers, to help make sustainable improvements in the quality of maternity and early childhood healthcare.

Overview

The Bridging the Gap partnership implemented and evaluated an innovative program of quality improvement in publicly funded universal health services designed to reduce inequities in maternal and child health outcomes of refugee families. The partnership involved 11 organisations, including public hospitals, maternal and child health services, refugee settlement agencies and researchers at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

Bridging the Gap included initiatives to:

increase access to professional interpreters for women duing labour

increase identification of families of refugee background in public hospitals and maternal and child health services

build workforce capacity to care for women of refugee background

co-design and trial a new model of group pregnancy care for Karen women from Burma.

Evaluation included the use of interrupted time series design to examine health service use and maternal and child health outcomes over a 3-year period of implementation. Iterative Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles were used to support program design and implementation, within the constraints of existing resources.