Education and training

Our first session provides an overview of HSRIS, with an introduction to Health Services Research presented by the Department’s Lead Professor Karin Thursky, and an introduction to Implementation Science from Associate Professor Stephanie Best. PhD candidate Rebecca Purvis from the Parkville Familial Cancer Centre and Genomic Medicine discusses her work titled "How do we implement polygenic scores for cancer risk assessment in clinical genetics?"

The spotlight is now focused on Survivorship, a team within HSR whose research aims to better understand the issues that survivors experience and their needs, and aims to develop and test interventions to improve survivors' wellbeing. The Survivorship program lead Professor Michael Jefford kicks off the session presenting recent findings into major factors that influence variation in experience of people affected by cancer. Dr Karolina Lisy presents her work ‘A Qualitative Study of the Cancer Survivorship Experiences of Trans and Gender Diverse Australians, and Professor Vicki White (Deakin University) discusses the disparities in quality of life, social distress and employment outcomes in Australian cancer survivors.

Our first international speaker, Dr Michael Halpern from National Cancer Institute (USA) presented on the topic ‘Patient Experience of care: what it is, how it is assessed, and why it matters,’ which sought to discuss each of these questions using several examples from clinical research. Dr Julia Lai-Kwon, a Medical Oncologist and Health Services Researcher at Peter Mac, presented an outline of her PhD exploring the co-design of an electronic patient-reported symptom (ePROs) monitoring system for people receiving immunotherapy, which seeks to involve consumers in the development of a platform that allows people with cancer to easily monitor, identify, and update their clinically-significant symptoms between visits. Finally, we heard from Ms Holly Chung, a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher with the Academic Nursing Unit and Department of Health Services Research at Peter Mac. Ms Chung presented on her work ‘Listening to What Matters Most: working with people with myeloma to select a suite of PROMs feasible to measure Quality of Life.’

In this session we will hear from Health Services Research member Associate Professor Karla Gough who presents her and Ally Drosdowsky’s work examining ‘Inclusion and representative diversity in psychological intervention trials for cancer patients.’ Dr Lisa Guccione, also from the Health Services Research in the Implementation Science team discusses ‘Understanding how to improve the use of advance care planning for all patient populations.’ Finally, from the Burnett Institute and the Austin Hospital, Professor Margaret Hellard addresses the concept of Missing Voices by questioning: are they missing or are we not listening or not asking? Professor Hellard describes her valuable research into Hepatitis C and working with people who inject drugs.

This month we enjoyed a deep dive into the findings of the ‘Shared care for survivors of colorectal cancer’ (SCORE) study from members of our Survivorship team including Professor Michael Jefford, Dr Karolina Lisy, and Claire Gore. This model demonstrates that Shared Care (between GPs and oncologists) may be an appropriate and cost-effective model of follow-up for colorectal cancer survivors, that is often preferred by patients. Professor Michael Jefford presented the slide-deck that he presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in 2023, where he holds a fellowship. Dr Karolina Lisy explores the qualitative findings of this work, and Claire Gore provided a psycho-oncology perspective.

The Australian Cancer Survivorship Centre (ACSC) was showcased in this exciting session! Hear from ACSC Manager Helena Kelly, who provides some context to the centre including the issues faced by cancer survivors and the initiatives that are shown to be beneficial. Tracey Mander, the deputy manager of the ACSC, discusses the state of survivorship work at Peter Mac and across Victoria. Lin Chai, Project manager for the clinical placement program in Cancer survivorship, provides an evaluation of the program. Finally, Nella Combe, a Peter Mac cancer nurse and project manager for engagement with ACSC discusses a scoping nurse-led follow up for people with lung cancer, providing views informed by lived experience.

Dr Sabine Deij, Health Economics program lead in the Department of Health Services Research provides a sound overview of Health Economics and its applications in research. Dr Lara Petelin from The Daffodil Centre presents on Modelling and Cost-Effectiveness and the University of Melbourne’s Dr Michelle Tew discusses the incorporation of future medical costs in cost-effectiveness analysis.

Health Services Researcher’s Ms Holly Chung and Ms Amelia Hyatt co-presented on their findings from ‘Social Return on Investment: Economic Evaluation of Supportive Care for Lung Cancer Patients in Acute Care Settings in Australia,’ which seeks to holistically assess and quantify the social and environmental value of a program, in addition to its economic viability using Cost-Benefit Analysis. We then heard from Associate Professor Ilias Goranitis from the Centre for Health Policy at the University of Melbourne, who is the Health Economics Lead of Australian Genomics. Associate Professor Goranitis presented on the topic ‘Discrete Choice Experiments in Genomic Medicine,’ exploring the use of Health Economics to inform service design in the context of genomic medicine.

Returning to the world of Health Economics, we now hear about the Health Technology Assessment Review from Professor Richard De Abreu Lourenco (Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE), University of Technology Sydney). Associate Professor Gabrielle Haeusler (Royal Children's Hospital, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, National Centre for Infections in Cancer, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre) describes her work in cost-effectiveness, exploring the implementation of home-based care in carefully selected paediatric febrile neutropenia patients. Finally, a co-presentation from Dr Dylan Mordaunt (SA Health, University of Melbourne) and Francisco Santos Gonzalez (Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne - PhD candidate) explores micro-costing methodologies and their application to genomics.

Bringing together three perspectives, this session explores the application of AI and Big Data in research: its current uses, challenges, and prospects. Kicking off the session we heard from Professor Christopher Fluke (Swinburne University of Technology), who is the Director of Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne. Professor Fluke drew upon his work using Big Data in Astrophysics to comment on the prospects and qualms of using AI and Big Data in a Clinical Research context. Dr Alex Lee (University of Melbourne) followed this with a presentation of ‘Phenotyping primary care patients with unintended weight loss data, algorithms and challenges,’ providing a specific clinical example of these tools in research. Finally, Dr Taya Collyer (National Centre for Healthy Ageing, Monash University and Peninsula Health) presented on her experience with biostatistical modelling techniques in a study exploring Natural Language Processing in the hospital electronic health record.

This session explores the use of large-scale clinical data to inform research outcomes. Hear from Clinical Haematologist and the Health Services Research Clinical informatics lead Dr Ashley Ng, Dr Vlada Rozova who discusses the use of natural language processing to extract information from medical data, and Associate Professor Daniel Capurro from the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems and Deputy-director of the Centre for the Digital Transformation of Health.

In the next instalment of our collaborative series with Digital and Healthcare Innovations (DHI), this session focused on data governance and the use of data and AI in cancer research. Dr Heidi Gaulke, Senior Manager at Austin Health, took us through the process and major lessons learned for accessing and using data in research from a governance perspective, in her presentation 'Smart Data Governance.' Dr Sanduni Rajapaksa from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre Research Computing Facility ran the audience through some major uses of artificial intelligence in research and academia, which provided incredibly useful insight for many attendees. Finally, presenting a practical example of the use of AI in cancer research, Brett Clark (PhD candidate, Physical Sciences) described his work in the use of auto-segmentation for head and neck cancer. 

To showcase some of our current Allied Health Research projects, this session features presentations from five Allied Health Researchers in a rapid fire format! Each of our speakers presented for 5-10 minutes about their work, giving viewers a taste of the diverse impact and outcomes Allied Health researchers can have in reducing the impact of cancer. In this session you will hear from Ms Jenelle Loeliger – an Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian and joint manager of the Nutrition and Speech Pathology Departments, Dr Susan Dragon – Research Portfolio Lead within Social Work at Peter Mac, Dr Jacqui Frowen – Clinical Lead of Speech Pathology, Ms Amy Bowman – Senior Clinical Physiotherapist, Clinical Educator and Allied Health Informatician, and Ms Celia Marston – Clinical Lead for Occupational Therapy.

In an exciting session with 4 presenters, we introduce you to the world of nurse-led research, where our amazing cancer nurses lead research projects. Nicole Kinnane, the first Peter Mac nurse recipient of the MACH-Track research fellowship presents her project ‘This is Me’ which explores the opportunity to integrate what matters most to older adults with cancer into multidisciplinary team meetings. Liz Crone, recipient of the Peter Mac nursing research award, presented on a study exploring missed nursing care, or care left undone or unfinished. Next, Dr Meabh Cullinane discussed the project ‘PANConnect: Overcoming inequity of access of specialist nurse-led care coordination at home for Victorians affected by pancreatic cancer.’ Last of all, Dr Priscilla Gates describes her exploration into ‘Web-based cognitive rehabilitation for cancer-related cognitive impairment following chemotherapy for aggressive lymphoma,’ an intervention for lymphoma patients experiences treatment-related cognitive impairment.