The Centre for Health Analytics at the Melbourne Children’s Campus recently supported a cohort to become CHIA graduates. We caught up with Elle Cartmill who coordinated the program for the Centre for Health Analytics, to hear about their experiences and the value that it has added to the centre.
1. How many of your team participated and graduated in the program?
We had 26 clinicians, data analysts, researchers, administrators, and health informaticians from across the Melbourne Children’s Campus participating in the program. We had 21 members from that cohort join us for graduation. We also supported an additional member with their resource materials and CHIA challenge fees.
2. What motivated you to get involved with the CHIA Program?
The Centre for Health Analytics aims to recognise and support our team members and affiliates across the Melbourne Children’s Campus with education, training, and certifications. In addition, as a new Centre, one of the goals we work through is developing our wider network and relationships. We wanted to create visibility of our health informaticians and support them with the certification as well as invite them to join us as an extension of the Centre. We recognise the importance of certifying skills and the CHIA, as a niche and valuable certification for folks working in the field of health informatics. The Centre aims to develop a data empowered workforce on campus, supporting and promoting health informatics and health analytics as a valuable discipline toward the development of careers; CHIA has been an integral as a part of this goal.
3. What are your team’s overall impressions of the program?
The CHIA cohort we supported shared a lot of the same reflections:
- The certification itself can be challenging even for folks who are fluent in health informatics.
- The additional resources, study sessions, mentoring, and overall support from the Centre was paramount to folks’ success of passing exams.
- Many participants gained insight and value from the various competencies as potential areas of interest or further training/education they wanted to explore.
4. What support did you provide your team?
The Centre wanted to provide additional support to the team undertaking CHIA and designed a 12-week immersive learning study program to accompany the certification timeline. In addition to the orientation sessions delivered by AIDH, the Centre provided twice weekly study check-ins, 1:1 mentoring, and a Microsoft Teams channel housing resources, checklists, calendars, and forums. Our CHIA Alumni from this first group will help provide support and context on the competencies for future CHIA cohorts, building further on the comradery and opportunities to collaborate. We based this model of support off of models we learned about in meetings we were privileged to have with Queensland Health and the Digital Strategy and Information Branch. We were also given robust support from the AIDH team and are grateful for the wisdom and assistance from Mark and Desiree.
Working as a team and supporting them through the program, was beneficial and showed in the success of the group.