Day by Day

A typical academic job description is described in the ratio of 40: 40: 20, or research: teaching: service. My research career has spanned a range of topics.

A long time ago I was shopping for Earl Grey tea at a time in South Africa when one couldn’t get such things because of the trade sanctions in protest against apartheid. I was in a shop that imported what I wanted when I saw a neuropsychologist I’d worked with a few years before in a spinal and brain injury rehabilitation unit near Johannesburg.

He didn’t recognise me at first, asking what degree I had. As it happened I had just completed a BA in public health and health services management. And so we met in a cafe next door and he interviewed me for the job. A fortnight later I met him in his office for a second interview.

I was given the job of project lead for a large study on the epidemiology of trauma in Johannesburg and Soweto. It was the most challenging and most satisfying job I have ever had. I couldn’t help but become a researcher.

In the mid 1990s I was working in a new generation medical insurance scheme and enrolled to do a clinical nursing masters titled ‘The socialisation effect of rehabilitation on people with spinal cord injury’.

When I told the CEO that I was no longer available for overtime he asked me to change my topic. He wanted me to contribute to his company by examining the effect of managed care on medication management of people with long term health issues, which I did. How do you say no to all expenses covered and access to high definition data?

My Masters thesis showed that prescription management reduces costs. Although I didn’t measure if prescription management improves health outcomes, I did observe that well-managed prescriptions didn’t blow out into incidental prescriptions to cover illness episodes related to the long term health issues.

When I moved to New Zealand I became a change manager for a number of health IT projects. It seemed like a good idea to use Action Research and Grounded Theory to do a PhD in information systems. I wanted to go back to my roots as a rehabilitation nurse and learn about change management (isn’t change management another term for rehabilitation – guiding people to move forward into new ways of working, living and playing?). As usual, my boss was keen for me to do this research and gave me opportunities to get involved, feed my research learning back into the organisation, and create the basis of a thesis. I completed my PhD in 2007, graduating in 2008.

Since then I have been an academic and conducted research on telehealth, e-referrals, patient-centred care, health information principles, organisational impacts of ubiquitous computing, innovation, health information strategy. By far my favourite topic is the patient’s role in healthcare and patients accessing and using their own medical records (from their point of view). Going back to my roots (but that’s a different story).