Research Students

Jennifer Hunter is reviewing the quality of information routinely collected in a multidisciplinary primary care clinic that integrates natural therapies with mainstream medicine. The project will also short list and pilot test questionnaires for measuring the outcomes of patients who attend the clinic. A minimum dataset will be proposed that aims to measure a broad spectrum of domains including health care use, physical health outcomes, disease prevention, quality of life and positive definitions of wellbeing.

From this project, the long-term aim is to develop a standardised online database that is able to monitor health service use and patient outcomes. The database will provide a practical tool to support urgently needed evaluations of multidisciplinary primary care and integrative medicine clinics in Australia.

Anne Marie Thow is looking historically at the relationship between trade and fiscal policy and population nutrition in the Pacific, and conducting policy analyses of fatty meat bans and soft drink taxes in Pacific Island countries. Her main interest is in the relationship and interaction between economic policy and public health nutrition.

Mr. Abdolvahab Baghbanian is conducting "a study of economic evaluation and resource allocation decision-making" to investigate the role of health economic evaluation information in the decision-making process in Australia’s health care system. It is envisaged that the results of this study can inform decision makers and health economists of the complexity of decision making in the health care system.

More detailed information is available at http://www2.fhs.usyd.edu.au/arow/healthecosys/

Surianti Sukeri is doing a cross-sectional study on the economic and human impact of CVD on patients and their families in Malaysia. This study will seek to address the household healthcare spending in respect to CVD treatment and to determine the effects of the illness on treatment compliancy, employment, household income, expenditures, productivity, quality of life, education, functional limitation and access to health care. At the same time this study will also provide an insight into the human face of the disease, particularly its psychosocial and emotional impact concerning household perceptions, affective responses and adaptation towards the illness.