Established in June 2013 under the Key Technology Partnership between UTS and Hong Kong Polytechnic University (opens an external site), the International Research Centre for Communication in Health Care (IRCCH) (opens an external site) has developed an impressive array of research activities, professional development training programs for healthcare professions and joint publications.
The centre itself is comprised of more than 50 invited researches, educators and practitioners from more than 10 countries, to explore communication in healthcare in a number of different settings and contexts around the world. The Centre’s strategic research agenda focuses on communication in healthcare to improve the quality and safety of patient care and to mobilise knowledge and expertise gained from research to guide the teaching and implementation of communication skills in healthcare education and practice.
Most recently, Professor Diana Slade, Director of the IRCCH, and UTS Associate Professor Roger Dunston were part of a team administered by Curtin University that has been awarded an ARC Linkage grant of $480,000. The team will use this funding on a research project to identify risk factors for re-admission and barriers to successful transitions of care for high-risk patient groups including the elderly, and paediatric and mental health patients. These findings will then be applied to provide effective, measurable and cost-efficient protocols to improve discharge transition outcomes for patients, carers and health service providers.
In addition to the ARC Linkage Grant, the same project has secured an additional $240,000 in industry funding from the ACT Department of Health and the ACT Medicare Local support.