01 November 2023

Director of Health Services Insights Adina Hamilton

Adina Hamilton joined VAHI from Safer Care Victoria to become our Director of Health Services Insights. In this profile she talks about how her team is managing VAHI’s core reporting program now and in the future.

Before coming to VAHI

I came on secondment in late 2020, and initially it was one of those things that we had early in the pandemic where everybody was moving around, putting their hands to work where they could best get the work done.

I applied for the job as soon as it was formally advertised, and I was delighted to be made substantively Director of what's now Health Services Insights.

What is Health Services Insights?

Health Services Insights (HSI) is the branch where most of VAHI's health service and clinician focussed reporting responsibilities sit.

When I originally came it was called Health Services Reporting, and part of the renaming was a revisioning of what the branch could do. The ambition of everybody from Lance [VAHI CEO Dr Lance Emerson] down is to not just to put out reports, but actually to help people use the data to do what they need to.

In the sector, that means to understand their performance, understand how safe and effective their services are, and make them better on both fronts. And in the Department, it means to understand what is happening in the system so that they can design the right interventions, policies and programs to actually achieve the better health and wellbeing for Victorians, as we're all here to do.

Key upcoming work

The focus for us now it to take the reports we've been introducing via pilots, learning from our experiences, and making that our normal businesses as usual. That means we'll be deemphasising the traditional PDFs in a lot of settings, in particular for board and private hospital reporting.

We've already started the consultation process to ask the relevant sector stakeholders, ‘what does the future need to look like to be useful to you?’

Interestingly, one of the things we’re starting to learn from them is that PDF has a place. But it’s not the pride of place it's had in the past, and that they do see value in the more interactive offerings.

Favourite thing about working at VAHI

The people. And it's really odd for, you know, a data nerd introvert to say that, but it actually is. In some ways, it almost felt like coming home. I've spent most of my departmental career as the data person in a policy area, and to actually come into a space where people have the same sort of focus that I do has actually just felt really welcoming. I think it's really eased the difficulty of having to do everything virtually during lockdown to still feel very connected with people here.

You can get in touch with Adina at [email protected] to talk all things data and reporting.