Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite
Foundation Director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation
Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, BA, MIR (Hons), MBA, DipLR, PhD, FIML, FCHSM, FFPHRCP (UK), FAcSS (UK), Hon FRACMA, FAHMS is Foundation Director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Director of the Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science, and Professor of Health Systems Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has appointments at six other universities internationally, and he is a board member and President Elect of the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) and consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO).
His research examines the changing nature of health systems, which has attracted funding of more than AUD $111 million. He is particularly interested in health care as a complex adaptive system, and applying complexity science to health care problems.
Professor Braithwaite has contributed over 450 refereed publications, and has presented at international and national conferences on more than 900 occasions, including 90 keynote addresses. His research appears in journals such as The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet, Social Science & Medicine, BMJ Quality and Safety, and the International Journal for Quality in Health Care. He has received over 40 different national and international awards for his teaching and research.
Jeffrey Braithwaite’s keynote presentation will be titled:
Making an impact: what I’ve learnt from John Snow, sisters who fight over oranges, goldilocks and the three bears, culture, networks, resilience, failure and success
How can we implement change in the most complex of systems? We first need to analyse how we think about healthcare, before we can tackle the plethora of challenges that modern health systems face. Once we understand healthcare as a complex adaptive system, we can scope and then initiate behavioural changes on the front-lines of care. Case studies in primary and tertiary settings, and in national and international contexts, will be discussed. Our international series on Resilient Health Care will also be analysed, including our key concepts such as work-as-imagined vs work-as-done, and Safety-I and Safety-II, all the while drawing on advanced ideas on complexity science. There’s even some space for stories about Goldilocks and the three bears, and the two sisters who fought over the very last orange in the fruit bowl – and both won.
Professor Beth Grunfeld
Professor of Health Psychology, Birkbeck College, London
Beth Grunfeld is Professor of Health Psychology at Birkbeck College. Her research focuses on determinants of psychosocial outcomes following diagnosis and treatment (mainly among patients with benign and non-benign lesions) and on the development of interventions to support patients.
She has developed and tested (through randomised controlled trial designs) multiple interventions aimed at supporting cancer patients. Such inventions have been aimed at reducing hot flushes and night sweats, supporting return to work and promoting prompt help-seeking for symptoms that could be indicative of cancer.
She has published over 100 research articles and book chapters. She is undertaking work examining experiences of scarring following breast reconstruction, predictors of psychosocial function following reconstruction and has current work underway looking at modelling predictors of psychosocial function following breast reconstruction (including the role of stress and wound-healing). Prof Grunfeld is also undertaking work examining factors that influence return to work following a cancer diagnosis and has developed a workbook based intervention and an app to support patients returning to work.
Professor Beth Grunfeld’s keynote presentation will be titled:
Sustaining cancer survivors’ employment in the 21st Century
Almost half of adult cancer survivors are of working age, yet cancer patients are 1.4 times more likely to be unemployed than healthy individuals. Cancer patients may experience ongoing negative outcomes (including pain, fatigue, and low mood) from the disease or from treatments, such as radiotherapy. These can impact on whether cancer survivors return and stay in work, which is of importance given that working is associated with better physical and psychological functioning. This presentation will examine key factors that affect employment among cancer survivors, and will outline the latest data on interventions to support cancer patients back into work. It will also consider challenges around support for cancer patients and conclude with the implications of the current evidence, highlighting directions for future research.
Professor Christine Stephens
Health and Ageing Research Team at Massey University
Christine Stephens co-leads the cross-disciplinary Health and Ageing Research Team in the School of Psychology at Massey University where she is a Professor of Social Science Research. The focus of the team’s activity is a longitudinal study of quality of life in ageing (Health, Work and Retirement study) which has conducted bi-annual surveys of a population sample of older people for 10 years. The research also includes in-depth qualitative studies on topics such as informal caregiving, palliative care, the experience of cancer, and housing needs. Christine’s research is located at the intersection of health psychology and gerontology. She has authored or co-authored papers in these areas for Health Psychology, Psychology and Health, The Journal of Health Psychology, Health and Ageing, Journal of Ageing and Health, Ageing and Society, International Psychogeriatric, Critical Public Health, the Gerontologist, and The Journals of Gerontology. She also has an interest in methodological issues and has contributed to Health Psychology Review and Qualitative Research in Psychology on qualitative approaches to research. She is author of Health Promotion: A Psychosocial Approach (Open University Press, 2008) and her latest book, co-authored with Mary Breheny and published by Routledge in 2018 is: Healthy Ageing: A Capability Approach to Inclusive Policy and Practice.
Professor Christine Stephens keynote presentation will be titled:
The environment and health: Using the Capability Approach to shift the focus of health promotion for older people.
Public policies regarding health are a critical influence on all levels of health promotion from individuals to populations. In this presentation I will describe dominant policy models of the health of older people and summarise the widespread critiques of these models and their unintended negative effects on the wellbeing of older people. I then turn to discuss how a ‘capability approach’ (Sen, 1987) to the wellbeing of older people can address each of these problems and provide a new socially oriented framework for research, policy, and intervention. The capability approach takes into account the influence of the social and material environment and the values of older people themselves. From this perspective, understanding the nature of wellbeing shifts to understanding the freedom people have to pursue the life they value. The third part of the presentation shows how our work is influenced by the focus of a capability approach on the environment. We have used longitudinal data from a nationally representative population sample to demonstrate the effects of housing and neighbourhoods on the health of older people. I briefly review current findings and then talk about their implications for policy and future work focussing on the development of ‘age-friendly’ neighbourhoods.