Parkville Precinct comes together to empower patients with disabilities

In an Australian first, DLOs at the Parkville precinct’s four public hospitals – the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH), the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Peter Mac), the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and the Royal Women’s Hospital (the Women’s) – partnered with consumers with lived experience of disability and their carers, stakeholders and our Parkville Electronic Medical Record (EMR) team to co-design and implement a new Disability Identifier questionnaire.

Called the Parkville Disability Identifier (PDI), the questionnaire enables consumers and their carers to tell clinicians about their individual disability and support need. This enables our health facilities to provide optimal, timely and tailored care to people with a disability - making our services accessible to all.

The RMH consumer Bradley O’Brien said working alongside clinicians in co-designing the PDI gave him “great pride” as he used his lived experience to improve outcomes for others living with a disability.

”By providing feedback, co-designing the questionnaire, and then testing the Disability Identifier, we were able to make changes and place questions into a logical order. This has made the process as easy as possible for consumers with a disability or their caregivers to complete the questionnaire,” Bradley said.

"I am extremely happy to have worked on this project providing my experience to make a huge difference to a person with a disability’s hospitalisation experience a more pleasant experience than in the past.”

DLO Louise Mogg said by having the PDI, health services across the Parkville Precinct are able to more efficiently provide appropriate care for patients with a disability.

“In a year, more than 3,000 consumers self-identified as having disability. Of those patients, 39 per cent of patients noted they required additional assistance when accessing our services. We were successfully able to make adjustments and supports to these patients,” Louise said.

“For the first time, the PDI is allowing us to create a snapshot of the additional support and assistance required for our patients living with a disability, allowing us to make adjustments to our health services to ultimately improve patient outcomes.”

Read more about how DLOs are supporting patients and consumers living with a disability.