Academic literature on the topic 'Information services Victoria Alfredton'

Data has been gathered by the Family Aide Projects Association from family aide services throughout the State of Victoria to enable policy and program decision making within the family aide program to be better informed. The 52 member agencies were canvassed to generate information which gives a more comprehensive picture of the operation of services than previously available. This paper presents a summary of the survey process and outcome.

Families are increasingly understood as inter-related systems where each component interacts with other components in diverse ways. Contemporary research on families which have children with disabilities emphasises the complexity of families and the futility of searching for one characteristic of a family as predictive of family outcomes. The current study investigated the relationship between family needs, family supports, and demographic information for rural families who were eligible for early intervention services. The study did not attempt to review specific early intervention services, but rather to associate the characteristics of services which families found most and least effective. The results are discussed in terms of the practice of providing family-focused models of service delivery. This project was funded by the Golden North Centre, Spastic Society, Bendigo

On 1 July 1993 Victoria became the first Australian state to use casemix information to set budgets for its public hospitals commencing with casemix funding for inpatient services. Victoria's casemix funding approach now embracesinpatient, outpatient and rehabilitation services.

Victoria's Women's Health Services and Centres Against Sexual Assault have implemented a range of indirect activities utilising various strategies and methods with a particular focus on information and resource provision, education and training, community development and promotional activity. They have increased women's access to existing services by working to make those services more appropriate and relevant. To achieve this they have involved women in the community in program management, design and implementation. Collaboration with other agencies in health and related services has also been a key strategy in achieving changes to mainstream services and fulfilling the aims of the dual strategy.

In order to find out how many and what kind of Hospital Patient Libraries exist in Australia I placed a "Request for Information" on our national electronic discussion list entitled 'aliaHealth'. This discussion list has presently nearly 300 subscribers. Most of them are located in Australia, but they also come from Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The e-mail address for 'aliaHealth' is: aliaHealth@alianet.alia.org.au. The result of my enquiry was rather poor: there are three Hospital Patient Libraries in Western Australia, one in Queensland and two in Victoria. The criterion was that the Library or Patient information Service had to be located within the Hospital grounds. The six Libraries or Information Services are described in detail.

There are few studies exploring the need to develop and manage culturally competent health services for refugees and migrants from diverse backgrounds. Using data from 50 interviews with service providers from 26 agencies, and focus group discussion with nine different ethnic groups, this paper examines how the Victorian state government funding and service agreements negatively impact on the quest to achieve cultural competence. The study found that service providers have adopted ?one approach fits all? models of service delivery. The pressure and competition for resources to address culturally and linguistically diverse communities? needs allows little opportunity for partnership and collaboration between providers, leading to insufficient sharing of information and duplication of services, poor referrals, incomplete assessment of needs, poor compliance with medical treatment, underutilisation of available services and poor continuity of care. This paper outlines a model for cultural consultation and developing needs-led rather than serviceled programs.

The objective of the study was to describe and explain variations in rates of hospital admissions for long-term complications of diabetes mellitus in rural and urban Victoria as an indicator of the adequacy of ambulatory care services. The Victorian Inpatient Minimum Database (VIMD), Health Insurance Commission data for 1998, Medical Labour Force Annual Survey 1998, Socioeconomic Indexes for Areas 1996 (SEIFA) and Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia (ARIA) were merged to determine the extent to which hospitalisation for complications of diabetes can be predicted from accessibility and utilisation of general practitioner services. The rural and urban differentials for long-term diabetic complications and their strong relationship with GP services, the degree of remoteness, lack of insurance, and Aboriginality reflect issues related to equity and access, patient and GP education, and inclination to seek care, all of which have implications for planning of primary health services in rural areas. This study describes a model for the analysis of ambulatory care sensitive conditions, and illustrates the important use of routine databases combined with other sources of information in quantifying the impact of factors related to primary care services.

Chronic diseases have increased dramatically in Australia and around the world over the past decade, causing pain, suffering, disability, psychosocial problems, early mortality and economic and public health crisis. However, many chronic diseases and conditions could be prevented with better evidence based and community based health promotion strategies. Guided by a philosophy of idealism, the aim of this thesis was to develop a community centred health promotion strategy to assist the improvement of health and the prevention of chronic disease in an Australian context. More specifically, the research was concerned with exploring the potentiality of statistical or epidemiological evidence and community collaboration as pathways to chronic disease prevention and improvement of health at an individual, community and system level. The research utilised a praxis paradigm and action research design over three stages. Stage One included in depth quantitative analysis of health and epidemiological data and addressed the question: What is the current evidence/knowledge about health status, determinants and inequalities in Victorian communities and the broader Victorian and Australian context? Stage Two involved qualitative participatory action research methods to engage a small group of community members from the Brimbank region of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) in the community governance of health promotion and disease prevention. The questions addressed were: What are the benefits of community based health promotion and prevention? What ideas for health promotion action does the community have to offer? Stage Three involved a minor evaluation of the strategy as a whole and addressed the question: In what ways, can health evidence and community involvement in health promotion contribute to better health outcomes? Stage One identified various determinants that impact on health status and result in inequalities. Stage Two revealed six major benefits for community based health promotion and prevention and generated a number of useful ideas for health promotion action in the community. Stage Three showed positive evaluations by the participants and identified numerous indicators of success of the health promotion strategy as a whole.

This thesis sets out to investigate the meaning, understanding and application of corporate governance in a public sector health service provider in Victoria, Australia. The methodological and analytical approach is based on an adaptation of the Glaser and Strauss’ grounded theory, using ethnographic and survey techniques to collect and describe data so as to capture a broad interpretation of how governance as a process is interpreted, understood and practiced in this organisation. Most studies of governance focus on economic compliance and performance, and questions concerning less obvious human elements of governance involving decision-making are left largely unaddressed and unresolved. In this thesis, these less tangible elements of governance are explored. The perspective presented here is that corporate governance is a socio-cultural phenomenon that requires not only an examination of the governance structures and processes in place, but also the direct observations of social and cultural elements including individual and organisational decision-making. There is a dearth of corporate governance research in the public sector, which has in the past decade adopted a system of governance more aligned to a private sector model. This thesis starts to address this lack. It combines a study of the Board and its accountabilities in the face of rapid change (analogous to the private sector model) with evidence from stakeholders to assess the impact of the governance in the public sector. From the analysis of the data collected and from the researcher’s observations, the health provider studied here can be described as having an effective Board. It appears to have integrated decision-making, with the Board strategically setting the direction of the service and supporting the actions of management to meet the key performance targets and measures as prescribed by the Department of Human Services (DHS). This research explores how governance as a process is interpreted, understood and practiced in the context of a public sector organisation. It offers a unique insight into the complex concept of corporate governance and offers a constructionist conceptual paradigm for further governance inquiry.

The increased use of online services in the commercial world has produced considerable impact on traditional technologies. Traditional information technologies were developed in an era where use of Internet technologies was not widespread. They have a long history and are often based on mature and stable technologies, or practices such as user interface design, artifi- cial intelligence techniques, and so forth. In the era of e-business, business operations are often conducted in conjunction with business alliances and partners through networked activities. Internet (or Web-based) technologies are fulfilling an enabling role to meet the communication and collaboration requirements of e-business. In this article, we share our experiences in how traditional information technologies are coupled with Webbased technologies to gain much-needed leverage in offering e-business solutions. Portals, as the major communication media for Web users, offer opportunities for collaboration using multiple technologies. They also serve as mechanisms for integrating a variety of online services supported by traditional applications. In this article we will discuss the role of portals in application integration for online collaborative service delivery. Particular emphasis will be given to the marrying of the modern roles of portals in e-business with those roles where portals fulfil the traditional roles of front-end technologies. The article demonstrates its vision through a portal-based application integration solution framework associated with a typical application scenario. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using portals in application integration by employing an experimental framework implemented in the PHOENIX research project at Victoria University (http://www.staff.vu.edu. au/PHOENIX/phoenix/index1.htm).

Information communications technology (ICT) has been identified as a key enabler in the achievement of regional and rural success, particularly in terms of economic and business development. The potential of achieving equity of service through improved communications infrastructure and enhanced access to government, health, education, and other services has been identified. ICT has also been linked to the aspiration of community empowerment, where dimensions include revitalizing a sense of community, building regional capacity, enhancing democracy, and increasing social capital. In Australia, there has been a vision for online services to be used to open up regional communities to the rest of the world. Government support has been seen “as enhancing the competence levels of local economies and communities so they become strong enough to deal equitably in an increasingly open marketplace” (McGrath & More, 2002, p. 40). In a regional and rural context, the availability of practical assistance is often limited. Identification of the most appropriate online services for a particular community is sometimes difficult (Ashford, 1999; Papandrea & Wade, 2000; Pattulock & Albury Wodonga Area Consultative Committee, 2000). Calls, however, continue for regional communities to join the globalized, online world. These are supported by the view that success today is based less and less on natural resource wealth, labor costs, and relative exchange rates, and more and more on individual knowledge, skills, and innovation. But how can regional communities “grab their share of this wealth” and use it to strengthen local communities (Simpson 1999, p. 6)? Should communities be moving, as Porter (2001, p. 18) recommends (for business), away from the rhetoric about “Internet industries,” “e-business strategies,” and the “new economy,” to see the Internet as “an enabling technology—a powerful set of tools that can be used, wisely or unwisely, in almost any industry and as part of almost any strategy?” Recent Australian literature (particularly government literature) does indeed demonstrate somewhat of a shift in terms of the expectations of ICT and e-commerce (National Office for the Information Economy, 2001; Multimedia Victoria, 2002; National Office for the Information Economy, 2002). Consistent with reflections on international industry experience, there is now a greater emphasis on identifying locally appropriate initiatives, exploring opportunities for improving existing communication and service quality, and for using the Internet and ICT to support more efficient community processes and relationships (Hunter, 1999; Municipal Association of Victoria and ETC Electronic Trading Concepts Pty Ltd., 2000; National Office for the Information Economy, 2002). The objective of this article is to explore whether welldeveloped and well-implemented online services can make a positive contribution to the future of regional and rural communities. This will be achieved by disseminating some of the learning from the implementation of the MainStreet Regional Portal project (www.mainstreet.net.au). To provide a context for this case study, the next section introduces some theory relevant to virtual communities and portals. The concept of online communities is introduced and then literature is reviewed to identify factors that have been acknowledged as important in the success of online community and portal initiatives.

The key strategic goal for research at Te Herenga Waka ‑ Victoria University of Wellington is to create a culture of ambitious research for transformative impact. To support this goal, a library restructure and investment in library teams supporting research has enabled a detailed understanding of the university's research output and how to increase its visibility. New working relationships and clearly defined research initiatives have demonstrated the diverse value of the library. New services and tools are outlined that help create value for schools, academics, and postgraduates; benchmark university performance; develop tailored services; enhance research profiles; and foster collaboration. Challenges and opportunities remain, including developing a university policy to support open access (OA) research and a new OA research repository to aid the promotion of, and access to, university research. The library continues to change perceptions of its services and works collaboratively to enhance individual and university research reputations.

This chapter uses a case study approach to highlight issues surrounding the provision of government agency sponsored programs aimed at increasing Electronic Information Literacy (EIL), as a basic requirement for community engagement in an electronically enabled world. The Skills.net program was designed to increase EIL skills by providing “free or low cost access to training in online services and the Internet for those in the community who are least likely to have access” in Victoria, Australia. This study found that whilst the Skills.net program did increase EIL, it did not adequately address the accepted training needs of the participants nor did it adequately adhere to known guidelines for success in information literacy enhancement. This experience provides further evidence of lessons being learned from many government agency imposed programs which do not provide adequate outcomes for regional areas as they grapple with the impact of being increasingly marginalized in an electronically enabled age.

The Australian Catholic University (ACU National at www.acu.edu.au) is a public university funded by the Australian Government. There are six campuses across the country, located in Brisbane, Queensland; North Sydney, New South Wales; Strathfield, New South Wales; Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT); Ballarat, Victoria; and Melbourne, Victoria. The university serves a total of approximately 27,000 students, including both full- and part-time students, and those enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Through fostering and advancing knowledge in education, health, commerce, the humanities, science and technology, and the creative arts, ACU National seeks to make specific and targeted contributions to its local, national, and international communities. The university explicitly engages the social, ethical, and religious dimensions of the questions it faces in teaching, research, and service. In its endeavors, it is guided by a fundamental concern for social justice, equity, and inclusivity. The university is open to all, irrespective of religious belief or background. ACU National opened its doors in 1991 following the amalgamation of four Catholic tertiary institutions in eastern Australia. The institutions that merged to form the university had their origins in the mid-17th century when religious orders and institutes became involved in the preparation of teachers for Catholic schools and, later, nurses for Catholic hospitals. As a result of a series of amalgamations, relocations, transfers of responsibilities, and diocesan initiatives, more than twenty historical entities have contributed to the creation of ACU National. Today, ACU National operates within a rapidly changing educational and industrial context. Student numbers are increasing, areas of teaching and learning have changed and expanded, e-learning plays an important role, and there is greater emphasis on research. In its 2005–2009 Strategic Plan, the university commits to the adoption of quality teaching, an internationalized curriculum, as well as the cultivation of generic skills in students, to meet the challenges of the dynamic university and information environment (ACU National, 2008). The Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) Program at ACU Canberra Situated in Australia’s capital city, the Canberra campus is one of the smallest campuses of ACU National, where there are approximately 800 undergraduate and 200 postgraduate students studying to be primary or secondary school teachers through the School of Education (ACT). Other programs offered at this campus include nursing, theology, social work, arts, and religious education. A new model of pre-service secondary teacher education commenced with the introduction of the Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) program at this campus in 2005. It marked an innovative collaboration between the university and a cohort of experienced secondary school teachers in the ACT and its surrounding region. This partnership was forged to allow student teachers undertaking the program to be inducted into the teaching profession with the cooperation of leading practitioners from schools in and around the ACT. In the preparation of novices for the teaching profession, an enduring challenge is to create learning experiences capable of transforming practice, and to instill in the novices an array of professional skills, attributes, and competencies (Putnam & Borko, 2000). Another dimension of the beginning teacher experience is the need to bridge theory and practice, and to apply pedagogical content knowledge in real-life classroom practice. During the one-year Graduate Diploma program, the student teachers undertake two four-week block practicum placements, during which they have the opportunity to observe exemplary lessons, as well as to commence teaching. The goals of the practicum include improving participants’ access to innovative pedagogy and educational theory, helping them situate their own prior knowledge regarding pedagogy, and assisting them in reflecting on and evaluating their own practice. Each student teacher is paired with a more experienced teacher based at the school where he/she is placed, who serves as a supervisor and mentor. In 2007, a new dimension to the teaching practicum was added to facilitate online peer mentoring among the pre-service teachers at the Canberra campus of ACU National, and provide them with opportunities to reflect on teaching prior to entering full-time employment at a school. The creation of an online community to facilitate this mentorship and professional development process forms the context for the present case study. While on their practicum, students used social software in the form of collaborative web logging (blogging) and threaded voice discussion tools that were integrated into the university’s course management system (CMS), to share and reflect on their experiences, identify critical incidents, and invite comment on their responses and reactions from peers.