1)  Title: Visual display of the current services and pathways for pulmonary rehabilitation services provided by the St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne Health Independence Program.   

2) Background: St Vincent’s hospital is one of the most reputed tertiary healthcare organizations in Australia. It provides various patient healthcare services that include critical and emergency, diagnostics, surgical and acute medical services, aged care, allied health, rehabilitation and residential care. HIP or Health Independence Program was introduced by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2008 bringing together the four previously separate service streams of Sub acute Ambulatory Care, Post-Acute Care, Hospital Admission Risk Program and Residential In Reach under common guidelines. The intent of HIP is to deliver improved outcomes for clients and to support hospital demand management and flow, through delivering integrated and coordinated care to clients across the hospital and community interface, reducing duplication and fragmentation of services and ensuring client centered care planning. HIP sees the coming together of separate and clinically discrete teams that offer a wide range of home, centre-based and community-based assessment, management, rehabilitation and support to clients (and their carers/families) with chronic diseases, complex health issues and psychosocial issues.

 The project requires developing of a visual representation of the current Health Independence Program service delivery to clients with chronic lung conditions suitable for both internal and external use.

3)     Aims: To create or design a visual service mapping poster by gathering information on various services provided to the respiratory patients by the hospital.

4)     Objectives:  To understand current services offered by the hospital to clients with respiratory disease and mapping those services and determining how the current offered services differ from the best practice guidelines. Using the above gathered information a visual poster is to be designed which represents current services pathway and also to develop a decision-tree to support HIP Central Intake decision-making based on service map. 

5)     Methods: To achieve the above objectives the following methods will be applied: Literature review will be carried out in order to obtain information on various respiratory diseases and conditions. Information on various interventions those are currently applied to manage the respiratory diseases and improve the quality of life for the patients will be obtained. Further information on current service delivery will be gathered by interviewing stakeholders. Service delivery for various HIP services such as Complex Care, Cardiopulmonary Rehab, Rehab in the Home, Community Rehabilitation Centre will be observed. Mapping of current services including details of what services offer, referral processes, model of service delivery, client demographics and outcomes will be done. Information on local, national and international current best practice guidelines for respiratory rehabilitation will be obtained. Based on this determination of how the current service offered at the hospital differs from best practice guideline will be carried out. With the gathered information a visual poster will be designed to represent the current service pathways offered by St Vincent’s hospital. Also a decision-tree will be developed to support HIP Central Intake decision-making based on service map. 

6)     Main outcomes: Development of visual service mapping poster and Decision-tree. Both of these act as tools in understanding the current services and pathways offered by the St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne for pulmonary rehabilitation. It also helps in understanding and easy decision making of the services.

7)     Evaluation: The designed interview structure will be tested and then evaluated by the Project supervisor. Feedbacks will be received after every interview conducted with the stakeholders and then a detailed report is to be made which will be made available to be evaluated by the supervisors. Also the designed visual representations after gathering the information from the stakeholders will be evaluated by the Project supervisor

8)     Dissemination: Interview questions and structure are to be designed and demonstrated to the supervisor of the project before testing on the stakeholders. Information about the different services and pathways for pulmonary rehabilitation offered by the St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne will be displayed on a visual poster. A presentation will be developed and the results will be presented to the supervisor and stakeholders.

9)  Timeline: Total time of study is ten weeks at the organization. Key tasks or activities to be carried out are as follows:

Week 1/2 – complete reading and meet with supervision team Week 2 – develop interview structure and test on someone

Week 3-7 – complete interviews with identified stakeholders and observe practice where appropriate; summarize guidelines and research for ‘best practice’ Week 7-10 – develop visual representations, decision-tree and gap analysis.