DELIVER: enhanced healthcare at home for older people in rural Australia

Older Australians living in rural, regional, and remote communities face unique challenges due to their geographic location. The delivery of home-based care (HBC) is growing, aiming to reduce preventable admissions to hospital, improve patients’ experiences of care, and contain healthcare costs. However, existing HBC efforts are often disconnected and ad hoc, with services unable to accommodate the heterogeneity in patient needs, and heavily dependent on face-to-face interventions that place significant pressure on healthcare resources DELIVER is a new five year grant, funded through the MRFF Rapid Applied Research Translation scheme, that brings together for the first time, rural healthcare providers, consumers, academic health science centres, universities, and national peak bodies, with the expertise and capacity to co-design, test, optimise, implement, and scale agreed and prioritised solutions. The DELIVER collaboration will focus on the western region of Victoria; the areas classified by the Victorian government as Barwon South West and Grampians. The collaboration includes rural and regional health services responsible for delivering health and medical care to this population, the Western Victoria Primary Health Network (PHN), three Victorian academic health science centres, the University Department of Rural Health, four Universities, the Victorian state government, and local and national consumer and policy organisations. DELIVER aims to build and evaluate a sustainable model for rapid rural clinical and health services research and translation across western Victoria, and to use this capacity to perform rapid identification, prioritisation and testing of local solutions to HBC that address the key challenges of delivering HBC to older people in rural areas.

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About the presenter

Professor Anna Peeters

Anna Peeters is Director of the Institute for Health Transformation and Professor of Epidemiology and Equity in Public Health at Deakin University. She is Principal Research Translation Investigator at Western Alliance, an NHMRC Investigator Grant fellow, Board Member for the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) and Obesity Australia, and Chair of the Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research Advisory Board. She is internationally recognised for her work building the evidence for effective and equitable policy and practice to improve health outcomes.