Associate Professor mary haines

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2010 Fulbright Professional Scholar

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“The recently published review of the Australian Health system stressed the urgent need to create a critical mass of researchers in Australia who can lead rigorous evaluations into changes in healthcare reforms to ensure that they will improve care.”

Associate Professor Mary Haines, Health Services Research Director at the Sax Institute and The University of Sydney in NSW has won a 2010 Fulbright Professional Scholarship to visit the U.S. for three months to research health care reform.

Professor Haines will go to the Veterans Health Administration’s Health and Services Research and Development (VA), the UCLA School of Public Health and the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles research healthcare evaluation.

“Implementing system-wide healthcare reform is a policy priority in both the US and Australia. The question I will examine is ‘will the reforms improve quality of care and how will we know?’” Mary said.

“National health agencies recognise the acute shortage of health system researchers in Australia to provide high quality evidence to inform healthcare reforms.”

Through her Fulbright, Mary will be able to learn innovative methods in evaluation that she can apply to current projects in Australia. She also will establish the foundation of a long-term program of collaborative research with her U.S. mentors.

“I propose to work with international leaders in healthcare evaluation based at the VA and RAND. Australia does not have an equivalent group of leaders who have developed innovative methods to assess the effectiveness of healthcare, and who can provide me with in-depth mentoring and methodological training.”

“The U.S. group holds data repositories of all VA health care encounters that have similarities to Australian datasets; thus providing unique infrastructure to support a long-term collaboration.”

Mary has a BA with honours in Psychology from the University of Sydney and a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from University College London. Since completing her PhD Mary has worked on health research and policy in the academic, private and independent sectors.