30 days after surgery: crucial indicator of quality of care

Women, older people and those with more comorbidities are more likely to have complications, discharge to a care facility, hospital readmissions or death in the 30 days after surgery than other population groups, according to research published on 15 August by the Medical Journal of Australia.

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Congratulations to our recently completed graduate research students!

Our recently completed higher degree students: L-R. Dr Ing Tiong, Mr Abkar Sayad, Dr Jennifer Reilly, Mr Runxuan Lin, Mr Jack Jerome

Congratulations to our recently completed graduate research students Ing Tiong, Abkar Sayad, Jennifer Reilly, Runxuan Lin and Jack Jerome - Well done! See below for detail of thesis topics, departments and supervisors.

Dr Ing Tiong, who is a practising haematologist, completed his MPhil on 12 July, "Investigation of NPM1 mutation measurable residual disease (MRD) in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) for early detection of relapse to guide pre-emptive therapy". He was supervised by Professors Andrew Wei and David Curtis, both in the Australian Centre for Blood Diseases.

Mr Abkar Sayad, who is a research fellow at University of Melbourne, completed his PhD on 19 July, "A Microfluidic-Based Biosensor Point-of-Care Platform for Protein Biomarker Detection from Whole Blood". He was supervised by Professors Patrick Kwan (Department of Neuroscience) and Stan Skafidas (University of Melbourne).

Dr Jennifer Reilly, who is a specialist anaesthetist, completed her PhD on 19 July, "Predicting Perioperative Mortality in Adults undergoing Noncardiac Surgery in Australia". She was supervised by Professors Paul Myles (Department of Anaesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine) and Wendy Brown (Department of Surgery)

Mr Runxuan Lin completed his PhD on 19 July, on "Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3 at the Intersection of Alzheimer's Disease and Epilepsy". He was supervised by Associate Professor Nigel Jones and Professor Patrick Kwan (both in the Department of Neuroscience).

Mr Jack Jerome completed his PhD on 19 July, on "Diabetes, Hypertension, and Inflammation, the Trio Mediating Diabetic Retinopathy ". He was supervised by Professor Jennifer Wilkinson-Berka and Dr Devy Deliyanti Biomedical Sciences (both University of Melbourne).

Surgery registries crucial to improving patient care, researchers say

by Anne Crawford

Monash University Central Clinical School (CCS) clinician-researchers are behind a push for the Federal Government to urgently implement strategies to overcome barriers to clinical quality registries for surgery.

Registries systematically collect data on markers of quality of care for a given procedure across multiple sites, identifying times where the outcomes for patients are outside the normal range (good or bad) by risk adjusting and then benchmarking performance.  That information is then used to inform quality improvement initiatives for patients.