BestSTART-SW has 5 key research themes: Healthy Beginnings, Health Systems, Population Health, Equity and Mental Health. Our ultimate aim is to transform healthcare for all children, young people and families in South West Sydney into equitable and effective care that makes a difference at key transition points and makes South West Sydney the best place for children to grow up.

The Centre of Research Excellence in Strengths-based Tiered Access to Resources and Supports (STARS-CRE) will address inequity in health and developmental service access for children from priority populations in the first 2,000 days from pregnancy to start of school. The new centre is a national collaboration that brings together a national team of clinicians, researchers, and partners from psychiatry, child and family health, psychology, Aboriginal health, paediatrics, social policy, health economics, and population health.

This CRE will pursue four broad themes to engage and empower parents to access right care at the right place and time including service navigation support: (i) Integrate new knowledge by co-designing with consumers and the community, the STAR program framework; (ii) Implement and evaluate tiered interventions tailored to individual needs; (iii) Incorporate learnings via policy and service translation using Knowledge Translation approaches and Health Economics analysis; and (iv) Increase health and medical research workforce capacity and collaboration with a focus on novel training approaches such as Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE framework) that will fundamentally shift the way we assess and deliver care. This CRE will be of national and international relevance as the first ever strength-based program in supporting children and families fundamentally pivoting from a risk-based assessment to a resilience based clinical care model for priority populations.

This project aims to implement a digital solution to address these issues and expand child developmental monitoring by adding screening components for the mental health and psychosocial impacts of the pandemic for children and their parents in the first 2000 days. The aim of this research is to use the WMG-E weblink at homes and in the community (when child and family and GP clinics were closed, and families had no access to routine well baby checks due to the pandemic) to engage parents to identify and address parental mental health, psychosocial wellbeing, and child developmental needs with a focus on CALD communities in SWSLHD and regional/rural communities in Murrumbidgee LHD.

BestSTART-SW brings together world-class clinicians, researchers, and policymakers, working with families, children and youth to create a Centre of Excellence in child-health translational research. Our team includes experts from different fields (e.g. psychiatry, speech pathology, paediatrics, psychology, public health and more) who share a vision to improve the health of South West Sydney.