Research, evaluation and advocacy

Our research, evaluation and advocacy aims to strengthen the communities we live in.

Research Projects

Current projects

Flourishing families, youth, and children

Enhancing Children's Journeys in Out-of-Home Care: A Multi-Perspective Approach.
Children placed in out-of-home care (OOHC) are a highly vulnerable group who face enormous challenges over their life course. Researchers at The University of Queensland, Life Course Centre, in collaboration with a range of partner organisations including Anglicare SQ, are undertaking a three-year study to examine children’s experiences of out-of-home care and their social, emotional and cultural outcomes. The project aims to provide evidence to improve service agencies’ understanding of children’s experiences in out-of-home care and how agencies can best support families, carers and communities to enhance the well-being of all children in out-of-home-care.

For more information about the project, click here.

Young Women's Voices: Reducing young women's offending through improved service delivery
Young women’s contact with justice and welfare agencies has increased rapidly across Australia and the world, creating a crisis that is costly and harmful, especially for young Indigenous women. Pathways into these systems are gendered; but the systems were designed to address the needs of young male offenders. This project therefore aims to discover how these systems could be better designed to improve outcomes for young women. The project uses a novel approach that gives young women a voice in how five Anglicare end-users (the research partners) and other end-users can enhance their service provision in the welfare and justice sectors and become models of best practice. For more information, click here.
Hanging by a Thread: Our Search for Home
In this photovoice project, young people from Anglicare’s youth homelessness services explored their personal perceptions of home and homelessness through their photography.

The project is a collaboration between Anglicare SQ and The University of Queensland Life Course Centre. It emerged from a desire to provide a channel for the young people that Anglicare supports through our INSYNC and Integrated Bail Initiative programs to influence the fitout of our new youth accommodation at Beenleigh; to enrich and enhance our service delivery; and to inform our advocacy.

For more information, click here.

Seniors

Knowledge Brokers for Evidence Translation to Improve the Quality Use of Medicines in Residential Aged Care (EMBRACE).
Psychotropic medicines are used to help sleep, improve mood and aid management of changed behaviour in dementia. While useful in some circumstances, these medicines can cause harm, especially in older people. Continuous quality improvement processes seek to measure and improve care and are used to some degree in all aged care facilities to support safe and effective use of psychotropic medicines.

This study will conduct interviews and focus groups with facility staff, healthcare providers, residents, family and informal carers to understand the strengths, challenges and opportunities of current continuous quality improvement processes regarding psychotropic medicines. This will inform the development of an intervention to support implementation of best-practice guidelines into practice. For more information, click here.

ELDAC Project: End of Life Care Directions Working Together Program
The primary aim of this project is to improve quality of end-of life care, prevent unnecessary hospital admissions and shorten hospital stays, through improving collaboration between aged care, primary care, and palliative care services, and the palliative care and advance care planning skills of aged care staff and GPs.

Wound Clinic Pilot Project University of Queensland
The aims of the Wound Clinic Pilot Project included the following:

· To establish a community-based Wound Clinic in an identified area of high need to improve access wound care, reduce hospitalisations through early intervention and implementation of evidence-based treatment

· To reduce the risk of wound recurrence and improve health-related quality of life by working in partnership with clients, their carer(s), general practitioners and the broader community to equip clients with the knowledge and skills needed to better manage their chronic conditions

· To build workforce capacity by implementing a clinical coaching and student work integrated learning model of service delivery

CSIRO CHSP Smarter Safer Homes: Consumer-centric and On-Demand Aged Care Service Delivery through Smarter Safer Home Platform
Echoing the preferences of many aging people, there has been an increasing policy emphasis on early intervention and ‘healthy’ ageing combined with ‘ageing in place’. That is, keeping older people out of health and residential facilities for as long as possible. Such policies have been identified as potentially more cost effective from a government point of view, for example, it costs the Commonwealth, more to fund a residential aged care bed compared to the average cost of a Commonwealth Home Support Programme.

The Commonwealth Home Support Package (CHSP) is one such policy initiative and involves the funding of a range of entry-level service types to older persons based on an independent assessment via My Aged Care (MAC), the Australian Government entry point into the aged-care system. It is therefore imperative that services provided through such policy initiatives achieve the maximum benefits possible to those who receive this support in order to deliver cost-effective care that is aligned with aged people’s preferences.

This project aims to develop a novel consumer-centred and on-demand aged care service delivery model of CHSP to support older persons who choose to live, with varying levels of government funded support services, in their own homes. This project will use the SSH platform to gain an understanding of whether the most suitable services have been chosen and implemented, for older individuals being supported by CHSP funding. For more information, click here.

The Good Neighbour Program (GNP): An innovative social support/educational integrated intervention in residential aged-care. University of Queensland
The Good Neighbour program aimed to improve the quality of care and life in the residential aged care. It is a social intervention for residents who are isolated and have little social support outside the facility. UQ students volunteer their time and work on building relationships with the residents, many of whom have mental health and behavioural issues, as well as age-related decline. For more information, click here or here.