Hon John Hill

John was born and raised in Sydney. After high school, John completed a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney University, while undertaking part time work as a taxi driver, factory hand and sales assistant.   At age 24 John moved to Adelaide to work as a secondary teacher.   At Adelaide University he completed a Diploma of Education and a Bachelor of Laws.

From 1986 to 1989 John was an Adviser to the Minister for Education, before being appointed as an official of the Australian Labor Party.  From 1994 to 1997 he was Labor's State Secretary for South Australia.  John was first elected to Parliament in 1997 as the member for the southern coastal electorate of Kaurna and appointed to the Shadow Cabinet.  Following the election of the Labor Government in March 2002, John was appointed Minister for Environment and Conservation (until 23 March 2006), Minister for the River Murray (until 22 July 2004), Minister for the Southern Suburbs, Minister Assisting the Premier in the Arts, and Minister for Gambling (until 4 December 2002).  On the 4 November 2005, John was appointed as Minister for Health. On 25 March 2010, John was appointed as Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse.  John was Minister for Consumer Affairs and Multicultural Affairs from 30 June 2003 until 29 August 2003.  John has two adult sons and lives in his electorate with his wife Andrea.

Hon Tanya Plibersek

Tanya was elected to the Australian Parliament as the Federal Member for Sydney at the 1998 federal election.  In her first speech to House of Representatives, Tanya spoke of her strong interest in social justice and her conviction that ordinary people working together can achieve positive change.  Tanya became a Shadow Minister after the 2004 federal election and for the next three years was responsible for a range of portfolios including childcare, work and family, women, youth, human services and housing.

Following the election of the Rudd Government in 2007, Tanya was appointed Minister for Housing and Minister for the Status of Women. As Minister for Housing, Tanya delivered a wide ranging reform agenda, including significant new investments in affordable rental housing.  Tanya was also responsible for a Homelessness White Paper that set out a comprehensive national strategy to tackle homelessness in Australia.  As Minister for the Status of Women, Tanya was responsible for development of the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children. Following the 2010 federal election, Tanya was appointed Minister for Human Services and Minister for Social Inclusion. On 14 December 2011, Tanya was appointed to Minister for Health.

Tanya lives in Sydney with her husband Michael and children Anna, Joseph and Louis. Tanya is fond of bushwalking and 18th Century novels.

Kim Snowball

Kim is Director General of WA Health, and heads a staff of 40,000 and oversees the provision of Hospital and health services to almost 2.3 million Western Australians in a State covering 2.5 million square kilometres.  He is also the current Chair of the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council.

Kim is a highly experienced public servant and certified practising accountant, and was previously the Chief Executive of the WA Country Health Service.  This followed some fifteen years in senior management and policy development roles in Country Health.  He commenced as Director General in January 2010 and brings with him a wealth of experience in health, having worked in senior leadership roles in both the public and private health sectors, and as a consultant to Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments.

Kim is responsible for a total health budget of $6.7billion and is at the helm of WA Health during a period of major reform. These health system reforms have included the development of a system of Activity Based Funding and Management and the implementation of the Four Hour Rule Program across all major WA hospitals, both programs now adopted nationally.  He also provides key policy advice to the State Government on the national health and hospital reforms and the priority areas of Aboriginal Health, General Practice, Aged Care and remote service delivery to improve services for Western Australians.  More recently Mr Snowball has focussed on the required reform to the State’s Health and Medical Research effort to underpin an investment strategy to improve health outcomes.

Kim has dedicated himself and the leadership team to improving health outcomes for Aboriginal Western Australians through employment initiatives, better targeted services, and partnerships with Aboriginal Community-Controlled Services to jointly plan and implement health improvement initiatives.

Robyn McDermott

Robyn is a public health physician with over 25 years experience working as a primary care clinician, health services manager, epidemiologist and researcher in many parts of (mainly remote) Australia, and nearly 5 years in refugee health care in South East Asia in the 1980's and 90's.

Her principal research interests are in chronic disease epidemiology, community-level interventions aimed at preventing disease incidence and quality improvement trials in primary care which impact on health outcomes.   She has had continuous NHMRC and other funding for this research as lead investigator since 1998, including a 5 year NHMRC Practitioner Fellowship award in 2010.   She has served as a consultant for WHO, AusAID, PWC, McKinsey and State and Territory governments, as Vice President then President of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine from 2001-4.

In South Australia she served as Pro Vice Chancellor of Health Sciences at the University of South Australia from 2004-9, then as Foundation Director of the SANT Data Linkage Unit from 2009, as a member of the Health Performance Council from 2008 and the Public Health Council from 2012.  She is due to take up a 5 year Senior Clinical Research Fellowship later in 2012 to work on health system improvement for chronic conditions in high risk populations.

David Butt

David is the Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth Dept of Health and Ageing with responsibility for national primary health care reform, population health, and regulatory policy and governance. Prior to commencing in this position in August, David spent three years as CEO of the Australian General Practice Network, the peak national body for Australia’s Divisions of General Practice and State Based Organisations.

David also has worked as National CEO of Little Company of Mary Health Care (the Calvary group of public and private hospitals, aged care and home care services) and CEO of ACT Health and Community Care, including two years as Chair of the Australian Health Ministers Advisory Council.

Darren Benham

Darren is Senior Health Adviser with the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and previously held a similar role with the Department of Health and Ageing.

Darren has worked in health policy research and evaluation for close to two decades.  
Darren has a longstanding interest in Indigenous health and wellbeing and has led a number of large Indigenous health projects, including longitudinal research into the social determinants of Indigenous health in Central Australia, the effects of health risk factors on Indigenous life expectancy, and best practice service models for improving the mental health and social and emotional wellbeing of Indigenous youth.

Darren is an Honorary Fellow with the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin where he teaches epidemiology in the Master of Public Health Program.

Virginia Hart

Virgina has worked in the Australian government for more than 20 years in policy and program development roles in health and social welfare.  She has qualifications in clinical psychology and law and has a particular interest in directions in mental health policy and service delivery and disability support.

Virginia joined the Office of the NHMRC in July 2011 as the Executive Director of Research Programs. Her Branch has responsibility for the application and peer review process which supports more than 22 NHMRC funding schemes

Dianne Rudd

Dianne is Head of the Discipline of Geography, Environment and Population and postgraduate coordinator of Higher Degree Research in which there are 45 PhD students in the Discipline. She is also Deputy Director of the Australian Population and Migration Centre.

She has extensive expertise in the areas of Geography and Demography, with a specific focus on population ageing and health; future population growth and migration within Australia; international migration to Australia; family change, sustainable communities; gender and youth issues in rural areas.  She has extensive experience in quantitative research methods, survey techniques and analysis of census data to establish population trends and social change. She co-ordinates and teaches courses on Population and Environment, Population and Health, Global International Migration, Social Science Techniques and Applied Population Analysis.

Phillip Davies

Phillip was appointed as Professor of Health Systems and Policy in the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland in 2009.  Prior to taking up his current position he worked for 6½ years as a Deputy Secretary in the Australian (Federal) Government Department of Health and Ageing where he was responsible for several key areas of health policy including primary care, e-health, pharmaceuticals, pathology and diagnostic imaging services.

From November 2009 to June 2011 Professor Davies served as a Director of GPpartners, one of Australia’s largest and longest-established Divisions of General Practice.  He was subsequently selected to join the Board of Partners4Health Limited which operates the Metro North Brisbane Medicare Local, one of the 19 ‘first-wave’ Medicare Locals established with effect from 1 July 2011.  He is also a Director of Rural Health Workforce Victoria, a not-for-profit company that works to recruit, support and advocate for the health workforce in rural and regional areas of the State.

Professor Davies has undertaken numerous consultancy assignments for AusAID and the World Health Organisation in areas such as human resources for health and development of national health strategies and plans.

In a health sector career spanning more than 30 years, Professor Davies has also been a Deputy Director-General in the New Zealand Ministry of Health, a Senior Health Economist with the World Health Organization in Geneva and spent 14 years as a specialist health care management consultant with Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) in the UK and New Zealand.  He became a Partner in the New Zealand firm in 1995.

Professor Davies holds a first-class honours degree in Mathematics, masters in Management Science & Operational Research and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

David Perkins, Chair, Symposium Steering Group

David is Director of Research at the Broken Hill UDRH, University of Sydney.  He has worked as an academic and senior health service manager in the UK.

He is Editor of the Australian Journal of Rural Health and a Chief Investigator in the Centre for Research Excellence in Rural and Remote PHC.

Helen Berry

Helen is Professorial Research Fellow in psychiatric epidemiology and Deputy Director, Centre for Research and Action in Public Health, The University of Canberra.

In its first 2.5 years of operation, the Centre has won $3.5m in funding, published over 35 journal articles and established a growing reputation for policy-relevant research excellence.  Helen's research interests focus primarily on rural and remote Australia while also leading a program of research into climate change, sustainability and urban health.

Her studies mainly involve developing, merging and analysing panel and climate data to better understand the causal interrelationships among climate change, complex disadvantage, community connectedness and mental health.
Helen leads the health stream of UC's $6.3m Collaborative Research Network, Murray-Darling Basin Futures, with personal projects of around $1.5m. She holds honorary appointments at ANU (where she leads climate change and mental health research) and the University of Newcastle. She is author of the widely-cited and internationally used 'Australian Community Participation Questionnaire' and of the new 'Brief Weather Disaster Trauma Exposure and Impact Screen', both of which are now included in multiple large panel surveys.

In 2008, Helen contributed a commissioned report to the Garnaut Review of Climate Change in which she led a multi-institution review of the likely impacts of climate change on mental health and, in 2009, she was recognised with 2nd place in the prestigious Eureka Prize for 'outstanding research into the health impacts of climate change'.

Helen's research career builds on a previous career in public policy in which she gained invaluable experience in policy and leadership. She has since drawn on this to produce relevant and policy-applicable 'real world' research and to grow and lead successful research teams.

Jane Farmer

Head of the La Trobe University Rural Health School and Associate Dean, Regional, working across La Trobe’s rural campuses at Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga, Mildura and Shepparton.

Jane researches rural health and health services provision and is particularly interested in community engagement in service design, new service delivery models, rural health workforce and measurement around the impacts of health and other services on rural community sustainability and resilience.

Jane has written extensively on rural health services and led ground-breaking projects around working with communities to produce health services. She recently completed a large multi-country European Union funded project on community co-involvement in producing health and social services. Another recent research project – Remote Service Futures – won a Scottish Government award for partnership working and knowledge exchange. A book based on this community involvement research will be published in 2012: Farmer J, Hill C, Munoz S-A (2012) Community Co-Production: Social enterprise in remote and rural areas. Edward Elgar.

Until 2010, Jane was Chair of Rural Health Policy and Management and Co-Director of the Centre for Rural Health at the University of the Highlands & Islands (UHI) in Inverness, Scotland.

Lisa Bourke

Lisa is Associate Professor in Social Science at the Rural Health Academic Centre, The University of Melbourne.
Lisa has almost twenty years experience as a social researcher in rural communities in the U.S. and Australia, conducting a range of social research projects at national, state and local levels.

Lisa’s key research interests are in the wellbeing and social connectedness of rural young people and other rural health consumers.  She also has strong interests in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wellbeing, rural community wellbeing and social research methods.

Her current research projects address theoretical understandings of rural and remote health, rural young people’s wellbeing and young people’s access to rural sexual health services.

Julia Marley

Since 2006 Julia has been employed as a researcher by The Rural Clinical School of Western Australia. She is based at the Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services Council (KAMSC), in Broome where she undertakes collaborative research into improving Aboriginal health and building research capacity.

By embedding research into health services and including health service providers as core members of the research team we are better able to determine what information is required by these services to help them improve their services to Aboriginal people.

Rafat Hussain

Rafat’s career spans clinical medicine, preventive medicine, public health and health services management. She has a PhD in Epidemiology & Population Health and her research interests include: population health including rural health; health promotion; health services research; and impact of disabilities on families and communities. 

Rafat is involved in a number of research projects, the largest being the $4.8million CRN program. She leads the theme “Self-care and mental health within regional communities”, which has a funding base of $2.2million. It includes several research projects in collaboration with Universities of Newcastle and Sydney as well as Hunter New England Local Health District.

Her administrative responsibilities include Deputy Head of School (Research) & Coordinator for HDR programs in the School of Rural Medicine at University of New England.

Dee McLaughlin

Senior Research Fellow with the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health at the University of Queensland.

Deirdre is a registered psychologist, whose research interest’s centre on ageing, including rural and urban differences in mortality and morbidity, the impact of chronic conditions, gender differences associated with ageing issues and psychosocial factors associated with ageing well.Lisa is Associate Professor in Social Science at the Rural Health Academic Centre, The University of Melbourne.

Ellen McIntyre

Director of the Primary Health Care Research & Information Service (PHC RIS) at Flinders University, a national knowledge exchange organisation that generates, manages and shares information about primary health care.

She also leads applied research to enhance the sharing of knowledge and information among researchers, policy makers, practitioners and consumers.