New grants/funding

Truong M, Sharif M, Pasalich D, Olsen A, Priest N. Christian young adults’ attitudes and beliefs about relationships, marriage and family safety. RSSS Inter-College Grant. $51,313.17

Outreach and engagement

Anna made a submission to the Draft National Treatment Framework. The consultation aims to provide guidance to Commonwealth and jurisdictional roles in specialist drug and alcohol treatment planning, commissioning and monitoring.

We begin teaching the Social Determinants of Health course (as part of the MPH) in Semester 2. Liana is the course convenor, with many others in SCH contributing.

Jodie participated in the ANU Health Hackathon 2019 at NUS, Singapore. Her team came second place with their campaign to tackle the effect of Urban Heat Islands on public health by educating the public through a series of escape rooms that incorporate physical heating and cooling systems with VR to show users the effects of changeable policies on the populations health.

Jodie presented her PhD study at the Centre for Health Stewardship Seminar. Friday 26^th July 2019. Canberra Hospital

Papers accepted/published:

Nikolaou, C.K., Tay, Z., Leu, J., Rebello, S.A., Te Morenga, T., Van Dam, R.M., Lean, M.E.J. (Accepted 4 July 2019) Young peoples’ attitudes and motivations towards social media and mobile apps for weight-control: a mixed-methods study. Journal of Internet Medical Research.

Effective prevention at young enough age is critical to halt the obesity epidemic. This study explores preferences and usage of lifestyle apps among young people aged 13-24 years residing in UK, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Singapore and New Zealand. Young people are commonly, and consistently across six countries, concerned about weight-gain and obesity, and would welcome evidence-based mHealth programmes, provided the views of young people themselves are incorporated in programme content.

Sarma H, Budden A, Luies SK, Lim SS, Shamsuzzaman M, Sultana T, Rajaratnam JK, Craw L, Banwell C, Ali MW, Uddin MJ. Implementation of the World’s largest measles-rubella mass vaccination campaign in Bangladesh: a process evaluation. BMC Public Health. July 10, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7176-4.

This paper reports a mixed-method process evaluation to understand the successes and challenges in the implementation of a world’s largest measles-rubella vaccination campaign in Bangladesh. We used a range of programme evaluation tools such as Theory of Change, Root Cause Analysis and Process Tracking. The experiences of this evaluation are an excellent lesson for future evaluators when evaluating a complex intervention in a real-world setting.

Reports

Olsen A, Dilkes-Frayne E, Wong G, McDonald D. (June 2019) Pill testing in the ACT: Evaluation Progress Report. Research School of Population Health, ANU