European visitors encourage healthy respect for patient preferences
Published on 26 May, 2011
CQUniversity has been hosting visiting academics who specialise in using the latest online interactive technology to ensure patient preferences are incorporated during decision making by health workers...
One visitor was Jack Dowie, Emeritus Professor of Health Impact Analysis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the other was Mette Kaltoft, an R&D nurse from Denmark's Odense University Hospital in Svendborg.
Both Jack and Mette provided public lectures* relating to the use of technolgy for patient-centred healthcare. They also took the opportunity to tour Rockhampton, Bundaberg and Gladstone campuses and to meet senior academics and staff from health-related disciplines.
Jack had an additional interest in catching up with Vice-Chancellor Professor Scott Bowman as he was one of Scott's PhD supervisors in England.
Professor Dowie says software is now able to model decisions specific to each patient, drawing on evidence based on the latest professional findings and literature and including the entire treatment process from main effects to side effects and from the 'bother of the process factors' to taking the pills.
"My current work is on the development and evaluation of Annalisa, a user-friendly implementation of multi-criteria decision analysis, designed to facilitate more equal balancing of intuition and analysis in health decision making, whether it be in the clinical setting of the doctor-patient consultation or the macropolitical setting of health and non-health sector policies, programmes and projects."
Professor Dowie took up the newly-created chair in Health Impact Analysis at LSHTM in 2000, leaving the Open University where he had been a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences since 1976. While at the OU he designed and ran the multi-media courses on RISK (from the late seventies) and Professional Judgement and Decision Making (from the late eighties). Professor Dowie's early qualifications were in history and economics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and he went on to merge these disciplines in doctoral work (at the Australian National University) and subsequent lecturing in economic development and economic history (at ANU, Kent and Durham).
"What had been side interests in accidents, gambling and health eventually took over and led to full-time involvement with risk and judgment in health decision making and to involvement with both clinical decision analysis and cost-utility analysis in health care,"he says.
Before her current role, Mette has been project coordinator for a National Board of Health model project in Denmark called 'Cultural Mediators in Health Care' and a research nurse for the Paediatric Research Unit at Odense University Hospital.
She has also been coordinator for a project entitled 'Contraceptive advice for special groups', a project leader for an outreach project among migrant youth and a research assistant on a health promotion project related to alcohol policy.
* The recordings of the lectures are now on the CQUniversity website at: 2011 Public Lecture Series