Other key activities and highlights
During 2023 – 24 the CEIH aligned its projects to work streams to help theme and communicate our achievements in line with agency objectives:
Leadership and capability:
- Improvement and Innovation Showcase (IIS): Share, connect and explore why improvements were needed, how the change occurred, and what impacts they had in a live online format. Presentations are published through the CEIH’s digital channels to enable accessibility for a broad audience. In 2023 – 24, three IIS series were delivered:
- Series 11: Strengthening healthcare workplace wellbeing in South Australia attracted 531 registrations and 224 attendees.
- Series 12: Improving Healthcare Through Machine Learning and artificial Intelligence attracted 393 registrations and 128 attendees.
- Series 13: Environmental Sustainability in Healthcare attracted 568 registrations (150 more than the highest showcase in 2022- 23) and 289 attendees, the highest engagement the series has received since its inception. Series 13 was the first IIS series coproduced with an external collaborator, the Climate Change Executive Governance Group (CCEGG), as a precursor to the launch of SA Health’s first Climate Change Framework.
The IIS attracts people holding a range of position types from a wide demographic of organisations across the health sector. The year-on-year growth in registration and attendee data in addition to the positive feedback collated via polling reflects continued growing interest in the IIS.
- Innovation capability: The CEIH joined forces with the SA Health Young Professionals Group (YPG) to deliver the YPG annual conference themed ‘Ignite Innovation.’ This included a line-up of inspirational speakers and featured a workshop led by the CEIH to develop innovation capability.
- Informatics: Following from previous years, and based on feedback, the CEIH has continued to sponsor Certified Health Informatician Accreditation (CHIA) places across the health sector in 2023 – 24. For the first time the CEIH also sponsored a number of places in Digital Health 101 certification.
Tools and resources:
The CEIH has continued to develop and promote the ‘Project Lifecycle,’ which provides a roadmap and tools to support project management capability in the SA health system. The CEIH has made additional tools available on MURAL – an online collaboration tool supporting access from a wide range of partners and users – to support their project management processes. Since their public release in late December 2022, there has been 1,895 webpage views and 830 downloads of the project lifecycle tools. As of 30 June 2024, CEIH resources and tools available via our website included:
- Effective partnerships, tools, and templates.
- Guide to building sustainable workplace wellbeing.
- Culture of Innovation Discussion Paper and Guide
- Project lifecycle guide and tools.
- Data visualisation best practice guide.
Partnerships:
The CEIH Partnerships Strategy has continued to be promoted and used across CEIH, by our partners and broader stakeholders. The CEIH is committed to building capability and collaborative partnerships that enable delivery of innovative and exceptional outcomes in addressing complex problems faced by the healthcare sector. The CEIH is committed to supporting a strong and sustainable healthcare partnership ecosystem in SA by:
- Leading by example in building quality CEIH partnerships.
- Building partnership capability in the healthcare sector.
- Supporting system-level change though initial identification of enablers and barriers to partnerships in healthcare.
Formalised agency-wide partnerships for healthcare improvements have been developed and maintained with:
- SA Virtual Care Service
- Health Translation SA
- Northern Adelaide Wellbeing Partnership
- Digital Health SA
- Caring Futures Institute
Partnering with the Allied and Scientific Health Office, DHW to deliver an Innovation Challenge to all of SA Health, fostering innovation through allied health advanced clinical practice.
Development and release of a ‘Blueprint for Precision Medicine’ to support collaboration and coordination of effort across the healthcare system to deliver increasingly personalised care to all.
Consumer engagement: The CEIH continues to demonstrate its commitment to supporting the consumer voice by using a range of engagement strategies including:
- Consumer Lead position to co-lead the Palliative Care SCN alongside a Clinical Lead.
- Consumer representation across the SCNs and other key CEIH projects, including co-leading key working groups.
- Youth Advisory Group including young people with lived experience of healthcare.
- Ongoing support to and development of the CEIH Community of Consumers to create a safe environment to learn and share.
- Capability training for consumer representatives as they join.
- Training for SCN Clinical Leads to maximise consumer engagement.
- Supporting the LHN Consumer Engagement Professionals Community of Practice.
Strengthening workplace wellbeing: The CEIH continues its commitment to ensuring the health system is designed to prioritise, protect, and promote the health, safety, and wellbeing of the healthcare workforce to enable the delivery of efficient, effective, and high-quality patient care. To support creating a culture of workplace wellbeing across SA Health, the CEIH has delivered the following in 2023 – 24:
- Provided continued leadership, secretariat, and subject matter expertise for the healthcare workforce wellbeing sub-committee of HCEC focusing on driving system-level action.
- Supported the continued delivery and monitoring of actions from the ‘Advancing healthcare workforce wellbeing across SA Health’ plan for system-level collaborative action.
- Co-led the development of recommendations to inform the consistent measurement, monitoring and accountability for workplace and worker wellbeing across SA Health.
- Delivered psychological health and safety training to over 76 SA Health leaders, including Chief Executive Officers and LHN Governing Board members.
- Coordinated Series 11 of the IIS (see Leadership and Capability), focusing on workplace wellbeing in healthcare.
- Partnered with a metropolitan Emergency Department to undertake diagnostic assessment and leadership capability building activities to identify causal factors and recommended solutions to improve workplace culture and work design.
Supporting research and innovation: In addition to other related research and innovation support activities listed throughout this report, the CEIH has also supported:
- Collaboration with Health Translation SA to support and drive the integration of research translation across the healthcare system.
- Establishment of a Digital Twin Collaborative (including simulation), bringing together the health system working together on related concepts, to consider future grant opportunities, and provide consultation across projects.
- Exploring unwarranted variation in general medicine. The CEIH has engaged with stakeholders from Northern Adelaide Local Health Network (NALHN) and CALHN to investigate clinical variation in general medicine through a clinician led approach identifying opportunities for clinical decision support tools utilising machine learning.
Other highlights:
The eight SCNs and their sub-committees and working groups represent significant reach across the health sector in SA, with diverse membership, comprising:
- 57 SA Health Medical Officers
- 13 General Practitioners
- 14 Consumer and Carer representatives
- 15 representatives from Community and Non-government organisations (NGOs)
- 13 Researchers
- 30 Nurses
- 12 Allied Health Clinicians
- 16 Health Administrators/Managers
- 1 SA Ambulance Service (SAAS) representative.
Personalised care in cancer:
- Developed a statewide, standardised and streamlined pathway for mainstreaming of germline genetic testing for cancer treatment. The work was led by the Cancer SCN and designed by a multi-disciplinary working group across the health care system including consumers.
- Informed by a current state analysis, the framework enables consistent and standardised guidelines and pathways for cancer patients to undergo efficient treatment focused germline genetic testing.
- Mainstream genetic testing packs and education was provided to over 300 clinicians. An additional consumer focussed video was developed in 2024. Evaluation identified a significant increase in BRCA1/2 tests ordered through the mainstream pathway (14% pre to 25% post).
Cancer navigation framework and action plan:
- The CEIH Cancer SCN have partnered with Caring Futures Institute (CFI) on the ‘Cancer Navigation Project’, to develop an evidence based South Australian cancer navigation framework and action plan, which aligns with the Australian Cancer Plan and Draft South Australian Cancer Plan 2024 – 2028. The framework aims to address barriers and facilitate timely access to cancer care services, diagnosis, treatments, and care.
- The framework and action plan were informed by a high-quality systematic review of the literature, and in consultation with over 200 stakeholders including consumers, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and various communities across sectors and cancer types.
- The framework and implementation plan are currently out for final consultation for dissemination late 2024.