Projects

Professor Markus Seibel, Chair of the SOS Fracture Alliance, has been awarded a highly prestigious Investigator Grant by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) for a project to implement and analyse an evidence-based, integrated model of care for secondary fracture prevention in primary care. Funding of this project commenced in 2021 for a period of 5 years.

Over recent months a team of researchers from the Sax Institute Sydney and the University of Newcastle as well as Primary Care Physicians and Radiologists have developed a detailed protocol for the first stage of the project. The study has recently received Human Research Ethics Committee approval and will commence it's pilot phase in Western Sydney soon.

 

For out more here.

SOSFA is currently involved in a project testing how secondary fracture prevention may be improved in primary care in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs, supported and funded by the Central and Eastern Sydney PHN.

The project involves an electronic search tool that continuously scans the Radiology Information System of a private radiology practice and automatically identifies reports that describe a fracture. A fracture coordinator then makes the referring physician and patient aware of this finding and encourages them to investigate whether this fracture is due to osteoporosis. Follow-up contacts are planned after 3 and 6 months to see whether the fracture  has been initiated investigations and, if osteoporosis has been found, treatment according to current guidelines has been initiated.

If you or your facility would also like to be involved in a similar project or trial, please contact SOSFA at contact@sosfracturealliance.org.au
 

The primary focus of SOSFA's early efforts, the "Demonstrator Site Proposal" (DSP) was a multi-year project developing a mode of primary healthcare based secondary fracture prevention that could be tested in the Australian healthcare system. Initially intended for the Federal Government, subsequent iterations were then developed for each of the State and Territory Governments. Currently this model forms the basis for SOSFA's ongoing projects testing secondary fracture prevention in primary healthcare.

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If you have a project or proposal that you believe could further build on the DSP, please contact us at contact@sosfracturealliance.org.au

In 2020 members of the SOS Fracture Alliance convened with interested parties to look at creating a Binational Fragility Fracture Registry (FFR), with funding via an unencumbered research grant from Amgen. Similar to the Australian and New Zealand Hip Fracture Registry, the FFR will cover secondary fracture prevention programs in Australia and New Zealand. It is hoped to produce a first National Fragility Fracture report in 2022.

 

Find out more here

In this project, two electronic case finding tools were tested at two different hospitals in Sydney, searching several ten-thousand radiology reports. The project concluded its first stage in late 2020, finding that both tools significantly increased the proportion of patients with minimal trauma fractures being identified. A Poster for the project was presented at the 30th Australia and New Zealand Bone Mineral Society's Annual Scientific Meeting (a copy of the Poster is available on the SOSFA website). SOSFA has published a video summary of the project findings here.

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Currently SOSFA is looking for facilities across Australia who are interested in implementing and testing electronic case finding tools, with the aim to get pilot sites in every State and Territory health system to see how the tools work in their diverse operating environments. If you are interested in taking part in this project, or know a facility we should contact who might be interested, please let SOSFA Governing Committee member Dr Mark Kotowicz at mark.kotowicz@deakin.edu.au

As part of SOSFA's strategic goal to raise awareness of secondary fractures in the Australian community, we are developing a series of animated web videos that give engaging plain language explanations of key aspects of this issue and the solutions we advocate for.

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The first video in the series can be found on our website, our Facebook page or directly on YouTube.