Mrs Sarah Salmon1, Mrs Swati Agrawal1, Mrs Kim Tran1, Ms Sarah Dennis1,2,3, Ms Chau Nguygen1, Mrs Caitlin McMaster1,2,3
1NSW Health, South-West Sydney LHD (SWSLHD), Liverpool and Fairfield, Australia, 2University of Sydney, , Australia, 3Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research, Liverpool, Australia
Biography:
Swati, Kim, and Sarah are Senior Physiotherapists specializing in Women's, Men's, and Pelvic Health at public hospitals in Southwestern Sydney. Sarah has accumulated 17 years of experience across two NSW Health Local Health Districts (LHDs), focusing particularly on her senior role at Liverpool for the past 13 years. All three professionals work closely with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) patients. They are dedicated to improving healthcare delivery for non-English speaking individuals, aiming to provide more timely and high-quality care.
Abstract:
The aim of our project was to improve the equity, accessibility, and consistency of perinatal physiotherapy care provided to English speaking and to our biggest CALD groups of Arabic, Vietnamese and Hindi speaking women in South-West Sydney Local Health District (SWSLHD) by supporting women to understand their bodies and to reduce the numbers of new mothers suffering in silence.
We aimed to empower women to self-assess and self-manage their perinatal health and to understand when to seek timely professional help and thus improve health outcomes.
We created high quality videos and handouts about abdominal separation, back and pelvic pain, and pelvic floor problems in English, Arabic, Vietnamese and Hindi.
These resources are being implemented in the maternity services in SWSLHD with the vision to disseminate the resources to other local health districts and other multidisciplinary teams using QR codes.
The outcomes expected are reduction in delayed referral, a potential increase in referrals to our service as women are aware when to seek care, but also a potential drop in referrals, as women are educated and confident to self-manage.
We have used Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMS) such as consumer involvement and feedback survey, satisfaction survey and Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) such as PAM-13 and referral and attendance rates at outpatient physiotherapy appointments and wait times to access service for evaluation.
Ultimately our aim is to improve health outcomes, reduce secondary complications and chronicity of disease for women by arming them with knowledge and skills in perinatal physiotherapy care.