New grants/funding

Kamalini Lokuge and team received the Waterloo Foundation grant of 100,000 GBP for Developing, implementing and scaling MSF's participatory approaches to adolescent sexual and reproductive health

Keynote and invited presentations

Raglan Maddox, Katie Thurber, and Ray Lovett presented to the Department of Health on work underway in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tobacco control, titled ‘Deadly news: The downward trend continues in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smoking,’ 31 Aug 2020.

Outreach and engagement

Emily, Ellie, Kim and others submitted an EOI for a CVD predictive modelling grant (also Emily and Grace submitted an EOI for the cardio-oncology grant)

Jason, Ellie, Andrea and Deb presented an overview of new CVD prevention work to the Thiitu Tharrmay Reference Group

Ellie Paige is now sitting on the College Research Committee alongside Rosemary Korda as an Early Career Researcher.

Jason Agostino was invited to present to staff at the weekly Indigenous Health Division meeting at the Australian Government Department of Health. Jason spoke about the implications of the Absolute Risk Approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CVD program of work and answered questions from division staff. The program will come to a close at the end of August. Aspects of the work will be continued as part of a new program of work also funded by the Department of Health (announced previously) that aims to improve chronic disease risk assessment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Jenny Welsh and Rosemary Korda met with the ABS client liaison officer to organise future Policy and Practice forum, and to organise a MADIP analytics advisory group. There is also a number of people involved in providing training (fundamentals of epidemiology) for the ABS which is scheduled for September.

Grace Joshy organised a DAPH HUB panel meeting on the recent retracted Lancet papers.

New staff

Andrew Perusco has started with the Tackling Indigenous Smoking Team, after being seconded from the Department of Health for 6 months.

Papers accepted/published:

1. Richardson A, Joshy G (joint first author). Deconfounding confounding part 3: controlling for confounding in statistical analyses. MJA 2020. (Aug) https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50737 
    
2. Erlangsen A, Banks E, Joshy G, Calear A, Welsh J, Batterham P, Salvador-Carulla L. Measures of mental, physical, and social wellbeing and their association with death by suicide and self-harm in a cohort of 266,324 persons aged 45 years and over. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 2020. (Aug) https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-020-01929-2
    
3. Sarich P, Canfell K, Egger S, Banks E, Joshy G, Grogan P, Weber M F. Alcohol consumption, drinking patterns and cancer incidence in an Australian cohort of 226 162 participants aged 45 years and over. British J Cancer. Accepted (Aug 2020)
    
4. Kai Hodgkin has authored an article ‘Climate refugees and maternity care ‘ which will be published in the The Practicing Midwife - out in July/Aug edition
5. Thurber KA, Thandrayen J, Banks E, Doery K, Sedgwick M, Lovett R. Strengths-based approaches for quantitative data analysis: A case study using the Australian Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. SSM-Population Health. 2020 Aug 6:100637.
    

Snijder M, Wagemakers A, Calabria B, Byrne B, O’Neill J, Bamblett R, Munro A, Shakeshaft A. “We walked side by side through the whole thing”: a mixed methods study of key elements of community-based participatory research partnerships between rural Aboriginal communities and researchers. Australian Journal of Rural Health has the following publication status: Published in Issue https://www.wur.nl/en/Publication-details.htm?publicationId=publication-way-353638363335