Joanne specialises in health program evaluation and qualitative research with more than a decade of experience in these fields. She is passionate about meaningful consultation with stakeholders to understand and identify key issues they face, be it in the healthcare, education or community sectors.
She is highly experienced and skilled in conducting in-depth interviews and focus groups (both face-to-face and virtual) for formative and impact evaluations as well as undertaking qualitative data analysis and reporting to a range of audiences, from consumers to corporate and academic, and project management. Her focus is on providing comprehensive but succinct information to clients to inform services, programs or policies.
Experience
Over the past 16 years, Joanne has held several senior positions in both government and academic sectors in Victoria and Western Australia where she has applied her highly developed research and communication skills to produce practical information and tools for stakeholders.
Joanne completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, which focused on understanding how patients seek, understand and utilise health information (health literacy). The research involved over 50 consultations with patients in the acute, primary and community care settings. Prior to that she was a Research Fellow at the Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne undertaking research in the area of chronic disease self-management. As a Research Fellow at Curtin University she has been involved in project management and leading qualitative research across various research studies. She has published over 20 scientific articles in international and national health and education journals.
Consultancy Work
Joanne has undertaken a broad range of qualitative research and project management work for clients including study design, development and testing of interview schedules, conducting telephone/face-to-face interviews and focus groups, running Delphi projects, qualitative data analysis and report writing.
Topic areas have been diverse including adolescent pain and mental health, persistent pain in adults, pregnancy and post-natal care for women with rheumatoid arthritis, evaluation of a safety culture program within the tertiary hospital environment, guidelines for international work-integrated learning in health sciences, stakeholders perceptions of a state health research strategy, online learning programs and interprofessional practice programs and development of evaluation frameworks.