Following the lockdown of residential aged care facilities across South Brisbane and in the Moreton Bay region last week, Health Consumers Queensland and a consortium of six NGOs (including COTA Queensland, Queenslanders with Disability Network, ADA Australia, Palliative Care Queensland and CarersQLD) co-designed a single checklist and provided a series of resources to enable residential care facilities to communicate effectively with residents and families during an outbreak. As part of this...

Queensland’s best defences against a sustained outbreak of COVID-19 via community transmission are quarantine, border controls, testing and contact tracing. Ahead of reports of new cases of COVID-19 in Brisbane this week, 21 consumers had already joined forces with Department and health staff, Queenslanders with Disability Network and Palliative Care Queensland at a Consumer Conversation on Tuesday to share their views on the top barriers to testing and what can be done to address these and...

New grant funding underpins our consumer-focused COVID-19 initiatives​ Health Consumers Queensland has been successful in securing grant funding from Queensland Health to support our continued COVID-19 service provision. As one of more than 130 community-based health service groups across Queensland sharing in more than $30 million, the grant will help Health Consumers Queensland to continue the delivery of a number of consumer-focused initiatives. This additional funding will support:...

Consumer Conversations are back and they’re better than ever! Consumer Conversations have made a welcome return this week and it was wonderful to see you all again on Zoom on Tuesday. For this series, we have brought together our experienced and emerging consumer groups so the COVID-19 Community of Interest has joined up with the Health Consumers Queensland’s Consumer Advisory Group, the Health Consumers Collaborative of Queensland, the Primary Health Networks and the consumers who sit on...

As we mentioned in last week's eAlert, in the most recent Consumer Conversation we asked consumers for their reaction to the COVID-19 response from Queensland Health, and from us, Health Consumers Queensland. We were very pleased to hear that consumers were satisfied with Queensland Health’s response. Particularly compared to other states, consumers felt that Queensland Health has done very well to involve consumers to such a high degree, to listen and act on their views and concerns....

By acting swiftly at the onset of COVID-19, Health Consumers Queensland was able to pivot our work to support consumers and the health system to collaborate on solutions to challenges not seen before. This early action has played a key role in ensuring a consumer-centred public health system response to COVID-19. Through our work, Queensland Health has been able to hear from hundreds of Queenslanders with significant health needs and use that intelligence to form a more wide-reaching response...

Health Consumers Queensland is partnering with Griffith University in a new national consumer-led research study looking at people’s attitudes and resulting behaviours to the government’s containment measures imposed from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. Take part in the survey now. Dr Joan Carlini, who is leading the study, is a Lecturer in Marketing and Discipline Leader at Griffith Business School specialising in the intersection of business, government and society with a...

In March this year with the onset of COVID-19, the Queensland Clinical Senate and Queensland Clinical Networks, along with ethicists and other health professionals, began work on developing a framework that would advise care decisions if we were in pandemic and hospital resources and intensive care beds were impacted. In the early stages of the work, Health Consumers Queensland was approached to support the development of the framework.  From that point on consumers were involved and consulted...