News

Filed Under: HEALTH, INVEST, PROJECTS Tagged With: childcare, Children's Centre of Growth, Lumina, paediatric research, Proxima, Sanctuary Early Learning

Precinct childcare operator brings passion to help special needs kids

L-R Dirk Long from Evans Long, Lauren Hall, Damian Hall, Sanctuary Early Learning Adventure

Sanctuary Early Learning Adventure currently operates five centres across Queensland, offering the highest quality care and education, and will take this to a new level with their Proxima centre they hope will be a national role model for inclusive early childhood education and development.

Sanctuary Early Learning Adventure cofounders, husband and wife team Damian and Lauren Hall, predict the Proxima-based centre will deliver social outcomes to assist thousands of families caring for children with special needs, not just those directly enrolled.

Lauren Hall said they anticipate about 25 per cent of the 400 enrolments at the centre would be referred children with identified special needs, with the remaining placements open to general enquiries from the community.

“We have wanted to create a centre tailored towards identifying and nurturing children with special needs for many years and have been waiting for the right time and place to put this plan in to action,” she said.

“Proxima is the ideal canvas for us to work from, with an array of paediatric specialists and allied health services expected to work from within the building, in an established community of some of the country’s best medical professionals and academics at the neighbouring hospitals and university.

“The reason we have been working towards this more holistic model is because we were confronted by research showing the high percentage of divorces and the break down of family units when the requirements for a special needs child were not adequately met.

”We are disheartened by the fact that many young children are slipping through the cracks with physical or mental issues that go undiagnosed because they lack access to educators who are trained to notice early warning signs and communicate these to parents.”

Artist Impression of the Proxima

Damian Hall said while their existing centres are already completely inclusive, the new Proxima site will include a more dedicated focus on disability and special needs early education and care.

“We will have an in-house special education director, and will train all staff to be able to manage and identify those with additional needs,” he said.

“We will also be creating partnerships with specialists who come on board at Proxima and those who work at the hospital and university. These specialists will become part of our team and will, with parental permission, have the ability to work with children directly.

“We believe more needs be done to provide streamlined, accessible and timely support for families who may be struggling with a special needs child, and all families who are navigating early childhood development.”

Among the experts the new centre will be able to access close-at-hand is Griffith University Pro Vice Chancellor Health, Professor Sheena Reilly AM, a world leader in speech pathology research, who began her post-doctoral career at the UK’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and Institute of Child Health – Europe’s foremost centre of paediatric research – before returning to Australia 20 years ago and holding key leadership positions including with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

Professor Reilly has received more than $60million in competitive research grants to support speech, language and literacy development in children.

To learn more about Sanctuary Early Learning’s plans visit the Proxima site.

The $80million Proxima building will be the first private development in the Precinct’s Lumina commercial cluster, with construction scheduled to commence in the first half of 2021.

Filed Under: BUSINESS, HEALTH

Precinct responds with professional courses and health education

Upskilling, reskilling and diversifying are the catch-cries of the COVID pivot. There’s never been a better time to embrace career change, professional growth and business transformation, and here in the Precinct we’re at the forefront of preparing for post-pandemic jobs and business opportunities – from Griffith University’s extensive suite of micro-credentials, to a significant ramp-up in professional healthcare training and exciting new innovation programs.

To quote Albert Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

And as Eartha Kitt said: “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.”

Micro-credentials and professional learning the way of the future

The world of work will never be the same again, and the Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct (GCHKP) provides the ideal learning environment to support both its 15,000-strong existing workforce and up to 20,000 students, with an entrepreneurial ecosystem and research collaborations to create and grow the jobs and businesses of the future.

While capital city corporate offices have been stripped of staff due to COVID-19 impacts and work-from-home practices that look set to be the new norm, precincts like the GCHKP are still buzzing, in a COVID-safe way of course – anchored by essential healthcare workers and enriched by a research-intensive university campus that is delivering flexible education face-to-face and online, alongside an agile innovation hub that quickly created new opportunities for professional and entrepreneurial learning, both physically and virtually.

On any given day, the majority of the Precinct’s workforce, clinical staff at Gold Coast University Hospital (GCUH) and Gold Coast Private Hospital and those behind-the-scenes supporting them, are busy at the coalface – providing frontline services, and training to meet the changing demands of the healthcare system.

Each month, Gold Coast Health’s Simulation Service delivers students and staff up to 500 participant hours of training ranging from emergency care and trauma drills, to practicing patient care while using PPE, and COVID-19 safe patient procedures.

During April they really ramped up exercises – performing over 250 medical simulations, more than the entire number completed in 2019, while they recently funded a new advanced virtual reality program designed to finesse the laparoscopic skills of tomorrow’s surgeons, and improve outcomes for more than 3,000 patients who undergo laparoscopic surgery each year, while saving on theatre costs.

“Based on our modelling, this will equate to a reduction of about 10 minutes per procedure and with theatres running at a cost of $2,000 per hour, that’s a significant saving each year,” according to Obstetrician Gynecologist Dr Belinda Lowe. Improved theatre time efficiency and cost savings are expected to enable more than 250 additional procedures annually.

A simulation exercise underway at GCUH

Gold Coast Private is investing heavily in ongoing education and professional development – an investment that has seen the creation of an entire ‘education team’ comprising 10 nurses, educators and facilitators, focused on coordinating and delivering programs across different sectors, including diabetes, wound care and intensive care.

Graduate nurse programs have been significantly expanded, giving on-the-job training with financial support to enable staff to complete Graduate Certificates at no cost.

Director of nursing Debra Billington says up-skilling staff and providing education opportunities is part of the long-term plan to become recognised as a tertiary hospital.

“While we are already covering a vast number of areas we are continuing to grow and have plans to introduce education coordinators into additional areas including cardiac services, as well as continuing in-house training for advanced life support and paediatric advanced life support.”

Gold Coast Private has also launched a new digital program for GP’s, which has already attracted 900 doctor registrations from across Australia for their webinar sessions.

The comprehensive RACGP-accredited education programs offer fortnightly, digital education sessions, making it easy for doctors to gain their mandatory CPD points, in what is a national pilot for Healthscope hospitals.

Members of the Education team at Gold Coast Private

Stackable qualifications and flexible options

Griffith University is meeting the challenge of preparing professionals for new employment opportunities in a post-pandemic world by introducing an extensive suite of micro-credentials from Trimester 3, 2020 – 22 individual courses starting in November, and up to 100 in 2021.

The courses, created to assist professionals to fast-track advancement of existing careers, are specifically designed to fill the skills gap that is widely expected to dominate the employment landscape in the wake of COVID disruptions, and are a direct response to the Queensland Economic Recovery Strategy.

“Each of these courses has been carefully selected based on our extensive research into the future of professional work and the key themes that will drive our economy in the near future,” Professor Nick Barter, the Academic Director of Griffith Online, says.

“These are not typical professional development courses as they are specifically targeted to provide graduates with skills and knowledge in industries that will offer high-demand employment opportunities nationally as the economy inevitably makes its way towards recovery.”

Griffith’s new micro-credentials broadly focus on essential skills for ‘worker-learners’ in leadership and management, increasingly popular information technology courses around cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, and business concepts. There is also an extensive offering in the area of public health, including courses targeting pandemic management.

Courses can be taken individually, earning graduates a digital badge for instant accreditation; two courses comprise a Certificate in Professional Studies; or any four courses can be stacked to earn a Graduate Certificate in Professional Studies.

Griffith’s overall domestic applications were up 49% for Trimester 2, 2020, and already school-leaver demand through QTAC for health courses starting in 2021 is up 38%, above the market increase.

Learning anywhere, anytime

While Griffith has phased a return to campus for staff providing selective teaching experiences and support for students, along with a large cohort of researchers needing to maintain laboratories, many staff remain working from home, with a majority of students learning in blended or online modes.

Having welcomed new lab and office tenants during the pandemic, the Precinct’s Cohort innovation space, in the heart of the Lumina commercial cluster, has been nimble in its co-working offerings and creative in its online programs and hybrid events, while providing a valuable meeting space (COVID-safe and by prior booking) to maintain physical connections when Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings just don’t cut it.

Learning opportunities are largely online or in hybrid mode, including business mentoring, digital business workshops, bite-sized Expert lunch’n’learn sessions, and the Lumina Founder’s Club, launched in August, as a networking & learning club designed for leading founders of startups and scaleups to share their experiences, learn from their peers, and connect with fellow entrepreneurs. Many experiences are free, and others free for Cohort members.

Cohort TV also provides webinars and podcasts and a hosting facility for virtual events, such as the Gold Coast’s first NASA Space Apps Challenge event, part of the largest global hackathon, which will run in virtual mode on 3rd and 4th October.

Filed Under: HEALTH, TECHNOLOGY Tagged With: ADaPT, Advanced Design and Prototyping Technologies Institute, Professor Randy Bindra

Artificial wrist ligament on the horizon

PhD candidate Alistair Quinn with Post-doctoral researcher Dr Jayishni Maharaj test the artificial wrist ligament

New artificial wrist ligament technology offers the promise of not only repairing the most common wrist injury in young, active people, but providing a platform technology that will transform how sports injuries are treated.

With renowned surgeon Professor Randy Bindra from Gold Coast University Hospital leading a multi-disciplinary team in the Griffith Centre of Biomedical and Rehabilitation Engineering (GCORE), progress is heading towards human trials within two years.

The project, funded by an almost $900,000 BioMedTech Horizons program grant from the Australian Government, is using groundbreaking bioengineering and 3D printing technology to create hope for sufferers of Scapholunate Interosseous Ligament (SLIL) injury.

SLIL injuries cause dislocation of scaphoid and lunate bones and can be career-ending for an athlete and result in long-term disability for others, with current treatments that improvise to use tendon in place of ligament having a poor prognosis. Long-term pain, limitation of movement and arthritis are often the eventual outcome.

“What we are trying to create is a ligament scaffold that is customised to the patient and is seeded with cells, so its a live ligament that is ready to grow and heal,” explains Professor Bindra.

If we can perfect the science and make this a reliable platform starting off in the wrist, we could use it anywhere else where there’s a ligament injury.”

Professor Randy Bindra

Since commencing the pioneering project in 2018, the unique 3D printed bone-ligament-bone scaffold has undergone several design improvements based on finite element modelling to create an implant optimised in size and strength for clinical use. Using MR imaging, the team have created a digital twin for printing a personalised scaffold for implantation in a real size model.

In the final stage, the scaffold is then implanted in a cadaver model using custom drilling jigs and the construct is mounted in a robotic tester for endurance testing.

Ligament scaffold implanted in bone model (above) and cadaver (below)

The team is working with world-leading regenerative medicine company Orthocell, utlising their Cellgro technology to seed the printed scaffold with human cells, which will effectively enable the implanted ligament to regrow inside the patient.

“It is wonderful to see this project mature from a design idea to the real possibility of use in surgery – this could only be possible at GCORE, where a diverse team of engineers, designers, material experts and surgeons come together with the goal of solving clinical problems and enhancing patient lives,” Professor Bindra says.