Paediatric Waitlists… What are we Doing?

What are the principles of our Paediatric Project? They’ve always been the same… Innovative, place-based, equitable, multi-disciplinary and… TIMELY! However, due to the overwhelming number of appropriate referrals our waitlist has notably increased. The demand for Paediatric support has simply been more than our part-time service can handle. In fact, we’ve done twice as many co-consults in 2024 as we did in 2022 with the same resource!

So, with feedback from our advisory committee and after discussion with the Paediatricians we are trialing a few modifications, with the aim of maintaining our waitlist at under 3 months. We have opened appointments for the first 6 months of 2025 (until the end of our current funding agreement). If you are a professional involved in By Five co-consultations, please go ahead and book in review appointments. The calendar might look slightly different - this is because we have re-jigged things a little to try and shorten that wait! We will be maintaining our capacity building activities and local Paediatrician visits, as they are fundamental to the project.

We have enjoyed enormous success with trialing our dedicated Paediatric GP clinics over 2024, enabling many of the regions children to be linked into care that may not have otherwise been accessible. However, going back to one of those other principles - multidisciplinary - we plan to continue our current partnerships, but will not be opening up any new dedicated GP clinics in the next 6 months - we hope this will enable adequate appointment slots for our other wonderful health professionals on the ground supporting Wimmera children.

Please bear with us as we work through this busy patch, refine our processes, and please get in touch if you have any ideas or feedback - remembering that other important principle… place-based!