The research team is currently seeking Expressions of Interest from Postgraduate students to work on the Ophelia Victoria project. Those who have interests and experience in health services research, chronic illness, intervention development, survey interviewing and the writing of literature reviews are especially sort.

For Postgraduate opportunities contact: info-phi@deakin.edu.au. Please include your CV and covering letter.

Current PhD Scholars

Brad Astbury
Sustainability of Health Promotion Pilots: Towards a Middle-Range Theory

The primary objective is to develop a middle range theory (MRT) of program sustainability. The MRT will comprise a realist analysis of mechanisms that contribute to sustainability of pilot health promotion programs, and an explanation of how these mechanisms play out in different contexts and policy domains. The secondary objective is to examine the utility of modifications that will be made to protocols for conducting realist synthesis.
Supervision: Professor Richard Osborne, Professor Gerald Elsworth

Meagan Blackburn 

Understanding low back pain to improve patient care.

Supervision: Prof Richard Osborne, Prof Rachelle Buchbinder (Monash), Prof Bob Lewin (UK)

Rhonda Garad

Enhancing health literacy for CaLD communities across Victoria

Working with three culturally and linguistically divers (CaLD) groups; Chinese, Indian and Somali to develop, in-depth health and sociocultural profiles of each group, make recommendations for the adaption of the HLQ to increase utility in CaLD communities, identify positive deviance behaviours, effective interventions to increase health literacy and re-orient health services to meet the cultural needs of CaLD communities.

Supervision: Prof Richard Osborne, Dr Helen Mavoa, Dr Sarity Dodson.

Louise Sparkes

Drawing of the perspectives of individuals to design health literacy interventions

Louise’s project will focus on interventions to enhance health literacy in rural settings. Phase one of her project involves a systematic review of interventions to enhance health literacy, phase two will profile the health literacy of a rural site/s within the Ophelia study. The final phase will involve working with clinicians and managers to design, implement and evaluate an intervention to enhance health literacy in rural settings.

Supervisors: Prof Rachelle Buchbinder (Monash), Prof Richard Osborne, Dr Alison Beauchamp

Current Honours Students

Lauren Waycott

Drawing of the perspectives of individuals to design health literacy interventions

This project draws on the perspectives of individuals in the community to design health literacy interventions. This research aims to provide the foundations for the development of a health literacy intervention and is nested within the Optimising Health Literacy (Ophelia) initiative in Victoria. The study aims to inform the first step of Intervention Mapping (the needs assessment) by exploring the health literacy needs of individuals across a range of health literacy profiles. More specifically, the study aims to identify the barriers and enablers to good health literacy with the view to identify potential interventions points to assist people in achieving optimal health literacy.

Supervisors: Prof Richard Osborne, Dr Alison Beauchamp, Melanie Hawkins.