Understanding the benefits for health professionals

Today’s children face an increasing burden from complex health and development problems, such as mental illness, obesity, autism, learning difficulties and allergies.

Many parents experience issues such as diabetes, and heart and kidney problems.

Our ability to address these challenges using conventional approaches to research and problem-solving is failing to progress at the rate we need. It can take many years before information from research projects is analysed and outputs are implemented.

At present, hospitals do not have a mechanism to understand the health and wellbeing of patients once they leave the hospital.

GenV is an opportunity for hospitals—and clinicians—to understand long-term patient outcomes.

In turn, it’s an opportunity to help shape the future health and wellbeing of Victorian children and the adults they become.

Prediction, prevention, and treatment with greater speed and precision

GenV establishes the building-blocks to predict, prevent and treat problems with greater speed and precision than is possible today, creating the environment for new approaches to data-led policy and strategy development.

GenV is led from the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and supported by:

• The Paul Ramsay Foundation
• The Royal Children’s Hospital
• The Victorian Government
• The Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation and,
• The University of Melbourne.

GenV brings together researchers, service providers, policy-makers and practitioners with a solutions focus.

Backed by the data capabilities that GenV presents as a result of its whole-of-state cohort of children and parents, by creating and supporting these partnerships we will accelerate the discovery of solutions. Ultimately, these solutions will respond to the health and wellbeing problems facing children and families across our community.

An innovative approach leveraging existing infrastructure

GenV is not about creating new measures or metrics for health services and providers. Rather, it seeks to leverage existing infrastructure and resources to inform the growth and development of our health system and beyond. This will unlock new insights to ensure that together we can meet the evolving challenges we face in supporting Victoria’s children and families.

With an initial focus on maternity, GenV will connect information and bio-samples already held by other agencies and services.

Complemented with new data not currently routinely collected, GenV will give us a holistic picture of the health and development of an entire generation of children and parents. Learn more about the information GenV will collect.

Being part of GenV is an exciting opportunity for Victorians from all backgrounds to be part of research with a focus on public good, shaping the health and wellbeing of future generations. Associate Professor Joanne Said from The Royal Women’s Hospital elaborates:

“There is increasing recognition that the in-utero environment has a major role in future offspring disease. The need for quality evidence-based care is nowhere more urgent than in pregnancy at high risk.”

“Gen V provides a once in a lifetime opportunity to undertake large scale data linkage studies enabling all health services in Victoria to contribute to and benefit from complete and inclusive datasets.”

“In particular, it is inclusive of those often under-represented in research such as non-English speaking or socially disadvantaged groups who themselves are often at the highest risk of poor outcomes and a transgenerational cycle of chronic health problems.”

“Accurate clinical phenotyping during pregnancy using rigorous and standardised data collection, ultrasound phenotyping, and the enormous wealth of data that GenV can provide will help us to improve the rate of understanding and discovery for many childhood and adult conditions that have their origins in pregnancy.”