Future Care

In 2022-23, our Western Sydney Specialist Community Palliative Care team piloted smart glasses to support onboarding and competency assessments for palliative care nurses new to Silverchain. Building on our learnings, we have identified additional use cases for the application of this technology including medication management, wound care and medical reviews for palliative and hospital in the home services. 

We received a $2 million grant from the Medical Research Future Fund for research on and development of an innovative model of mental health care for older people to be led by Silverchain in partnership with Monash University. The Australian-first study, the ‘enhanced management of home-based elders with depression’ or EMBED model, aims to facilitate early detection and use of evidence-based treatment of depression and anxiety in older Australians who receive care in the home.

In an Australian first, Silverchain signed a memorandum of understanding with Sheba Beyond, (pictured above from left: Professor Eyal Zimlchman, Sheba Beyond, Idan Goldberger, Australian Friends of Sheba Medical Centre, Anna Barker, Executive Director, Data, Research & Innovation, Dale Fisher, Chief Executive, Anna Skipper, Board Chair) one of the world’s first virtual hospitals, to support knowledge sharing, collaborative projects and funding applications for digitally enabled care.

The partnership between Silverchain and Sheba will pioneer new models of home care, leveraging digital technologies to deliver complex health care services and will be led by Sheba’s ARC Centre for Innovation, which is at the forefront of global health care collaboration. The ARC (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate) Centre is based at the Sheba Medical Centre, which is ranked one of the top ten hospitals in the world.

Silverchain’s local academic partnerships also grew in 2022-23, with 17 university and research partnerships in place across Australia.

Key highlights for Future Care include:

The research underway across Silverchain is diverse. Our skilled clinicians are trialling new wound dressings, using big data to inform aged care policy and the provision of mental health services, building programs to prevent cognitive decline, and optimising the exchange of health information during client transfers. The breadth of research being undertaken reflects Silverchain’s ambition to create a better home care system for all Australians.