Researcher Profiles

Ms Kim Dalziel

Kim commenced as a member of Professor Leonie Segal’s Health Economics & Policy Group in March 2007. Kim moved from the Centre for Health Economics at Monash University where she had worked for 3 years prior to her University of South Australia appointment. She had also worked for the Centre for Clinical Effectiveness at Monash, and in the UK preparing health technology assessment for NICE (Nat Inst for Clinical & Health Excellence). She completed a Bachelor of Health Science (Hons) at Adelaide University and started her career at the Clinical Epidemiology and Health Outcomes Unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. In 2009 Kim commenced her PhD which focuses on the use of secondary evidence to inform health economic evaluation.

Kim's work has included economic evaluation of lifestyle interventions in the areas of nutrition and physical activity, and a review and investigation of all Australian cost effectiveness analyses published to date.

More recently, her current research interest continues to be priority setting in the area of child abuse and neglect of children. In press in 2009 is her published book chapter ‘Economic evaluation in child protection: what are the special challenges’, along with Leonie Segal.

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Prof Adrian Esterman

Adrian trained at the University of Bath where he received an honours degree in statistics in 1972, followed by an MSc in medical statistics at the prestigious London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His PhD was based on an examination of foot shape and its impact on functioning in military recruits.

His career includes seven years as a WHO staff member based in Geneva and Copenhagen and 14 years as a Principal Epidemiologist with the South Australian government. He has played a major role in the development of health statistics and epidemiology in Australia, including many years as National Convener of the Health Statistics Special Interest Group of the Public Health Association of Australia. He has twice been elected to the Council of the Australasian Epidemiological Association the first time as Treasurer and the second as Vice-President, and chaired the AEA national conference in 2004. Adrian is an international faculty member of the ACORD biennial workshops to train medical oncologists from the Asia-Pacific region in clinical trial methodology. He is a Chief Investigator on NHMRC grants worth over $6 million and is on the Editorial Board of three scientific journals and a reviewer for many others. He has over one hundred and thirty publications, most in the area of environmental health, evidence-based practice and cancer epidemiology. He is principal supervisor of three PhD students and co-supervises another four, as well as supervising an NHMRC post-doctoral Fellow.

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Dr David Evans

David Evans is Senior Lecturer within the School of Nursing and Midwifery and Program Director for Higher Degrees by Research. He gained his nursing registration from the Royal Adelaide Hospital and graduated with a PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2001. He has had a varied career in acute care, critical care, as the Coordinator of Reviews at the Joanna Briggs Institute and as an academic. He is widely published, particularly in the area of reviews and review methodologies.

His areas of research interest include all aspects of evidence based practice, program evaluation and reviews of the research literature. His current research interest focuses on aged care, specifically on the support of people with dementia and respite services for family carers. David has successfully supervised Honours, Masters and Doctoral students using a range of different research methodologies.

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Dr Duncan Mortimer

Dr Mortimer is Senior Research Fellow in the School’s Health Economics and Policy Group. He has over ten years experience conducting applied health econometric, health policy and economic evaluation projects and has previously held positions at the Monash Institute for Health Services Research, University of East Anglia, and at Monash and Melbourne Universities' Centre for Health Program Evaluation. He holds an ongoing position at Monash University’s Centre for Health Economics.

Duncan's current research work includes validation of the regression-based methods for transforming descriptive measures of health status into preference-based measures, economic evaluation of interventions for prevention of child abuse and neglect, and the development of game theoretic models of drug pricing and market access. He contributes regularly to ongoing debate surrounding methods for economic evaluation and priority setting, particularly with regards to outcome measurement, the inclusion of outcomes beyond the treated individual, and the influence of non-health characteristics of health interventions over funding decisions.

He has presented his work at national and international conferences and has published in high-impact international journals such as Health Economics, Pharmacoeconomics, Value in Health, Medical Decision Making, and Social Science and Medicine.

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Dr Barbara Parker

Dr Barbara Parker has worked extensively in the clinical environment, specifically in the areas of anaesthetics and recovery and orthopaedic and urology surgical nursing. Dr Parker has expertise in quantitative methodology and clinical studies and has published in the area of appetite, nutrition, obesity and diabetes.

In addition, she has expertise in gastrointestinal and nutritional physiology as well as expertise in programs in obesity, impaired glucose tolerance and diabetes utilising both pharmacological and lifestyle interventions. Dr Parker is a Program Director in the School of Nursing and Midwifery and teaches within the undergraduate nursing program.

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Dr Merri Paech

Merri Paech’s clinical and research focus is the area of child health. She is the Chief Investigator for an interdisciplinary research project concerning the impact of an indoor chlorinated pool environment on children aged 8-12 years living with asthma. This project is funded by a Channel 7 Children’s Research Grant. In recent years Dr Paech has worked closely with optometrists to develop expertise in RN vision screening techniques for primary and secondary school children, and to understand the impact of poor binocular vision skills on children’s classroom abilities.

Dr Paech has used a variety of research approaches and is comfortable with mixed-method research to explore the complexity of children’s lives. She has recently completed an evaluation of a children’s vision project (the ‘Eye Health and Low Vision Initiative’) for CanDo4Kids and continues to liaise with staff from the Department of Health, the Department of Education and Children’s Services, and the Optometrists Association Australia (SA), to explore ways to improve vision care for disadvantaged school-aged children. She is currently a member of the editorial board for Contemporary Nurse Journal.

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Dr Kay Price

As a Senior Lecturer within the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of South Australia, Dr Kay Price demonstrates expertise in qualitative methodologies and mixed methods research. She is a Chief Investigator of a successful epidemiological population based cohort study: the North West Adelaide Health Study. Her interests include analysis of health care and health services, quality use of medicines and managing complexity. Her research has focussed on exploring and evaluating service delivery and creating opportunities for the provision of appropriate health services and a health workforce for an ageing population and people living with chronic conditions. She particularly enjoys theorising differently and challenging taken-for-granted views or assumptions so as to advance health care and health services. As the author of over 150 research publications she has contributed extensively to academic thought in the areas of health care, health services and nursing.

Dr Price has successfully attracted national funding for many research projects (including two Australian Research Council Discovery grants and a National Health and Medical Research Council grant) and has also performed as a panel member on the NHMRC Project Grant Review Panels. Currently she holds the position of Board Director (Nursing), National Prescribing Service Limited and is the principal supervisor for three PhD students and has supervised three PhD completions.

Dr Price is the Lead Investigator for the research project, A Novel Approach to Self-care (A Sharing Health Care Initiative project funded by the Department of Health and Ageing). This research project will be finalised by mid 2011.

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Ass Prof Nicholas Procter

Nicholas Procter is an Associate Professor of Nursing and group leader for mental health research in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of South Australia. He graduated with a PhD from Flinders University in 1998. He has a long history of mental health research and service delivery and currently advises on mental health issues to State and Federal Governments. Some examples of recent work include mental health and suicide prevention for asylum seekers and community education on depression for NESB people. He is a current member of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Detention Health Advisory Group - Mental Health Subgroup, providing advice to the Federal Government on all matters related to mental health assessment and care of immigration detainees.

During his distinguished career Associate Professor Procter has been a consultant to health, immigration and human service organisations such as the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Programs Branch, Department of Health and Ageing; Department of Immigration and Citizenship; Multicultural Mental Health Australia; Headspace Mt Drewitt; Mental Health Nursing Education Taskforce of the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council Mental Health Standing Committee; Department of Health, South Australia; Department of Human Services, Victoria. His contributions are best described as knowledge application and generation of new knowledge to lead and inform improvements in individual and organisational service delivery to people with mental health problems and mental illness.

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Prof Leonie Segal

As Foundation Chair in Health Economics at the University of South Australia, Prof Segal aims to build research capacity in health economics at the University as part of a new Population Health cluster. The group will increase health economics capacity in South Australia, to support economics informed health policy.

An effective policy interface is being developed through joint research projects with government and through activities of the Health Economics Collaborative, a joint initiative of the Department of Health SA and the three SA Universities.

The Health Economics and Policy Group commenced in 2007 and focuses on the advancement of health economic methods in economic evaluation, including extending the scope of impacts beyond the individual and beyond the health

Leonie’s work with government includes advice, seminars and workshops for government officers, in health agencies (state as well as regional and community), central agencies notably Premier & Cabinet and Treasury and other portfolios that impact on health and wellbeing; such as Education and Children’s Services, Justice, and Families and Communities. Prof Segal is a member of the National Prevention TaskForce and the Australian Medical Council Policy Sub-Committee.

Prof Segal currently has two ARC Linkage grants - ‘Priority Setting in Child Protection: developing an evidence-based strategy to reduce child abuse and neglect and associated harms’ and 'Development and implementation of an evidence-based primary healthcare workforce planning model to support best practice chronic disease management’

Prof Segal currently also supervises 6 PhD students and 1 Honours Student.

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Dr Tahereh Ziaian

Dr Tahereh Ziaian BSc (Hons), MEdPsych, PhD (Health Psych), MAPS, is a senior lecturer and a community health psychologist with a long and extensive engagement in transcultural psychology and public health. Her research and consultancy activities at the state, national, and international level have made a substantial contribution to the public discourse on migrant and refugee mental health.

Dr Ziaian was recently selected for the UniSA’s Research Leadership Development Program to provide new leadership for the institution and the wider state and national research effort. She is currently the lead investigator of a large scale research project investigating the prevalence and nature of mental health problems affecting newly arrived refugee children and adolescents.

She is also involved in a Trans-Tasman research project to develop an innovative model of service development for refugee youth with mental health problems. Dr Ziaian was recently appointed by the Governor of South Australia to play a key role in advising the Minister for Health on the South Australian health system. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the Australian Community Psychologist.

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