Posts tagged University of New South Wales

Rebecca Ivers: Reducing the global burden of injury through effective prevention and trauma care

By Neena Bhandari

Growing up in suburban south Sydney, Rebecca Ivers and her siblings were always encouraged to strive for academic excellence and work towards making a positive difference in people’s lives. She got involved with a group called Student Initiatives in Community Health while doing her undergraduate degree in optometry at the University of New South Wales [UNSW]. It triggered her interest in population and public health and gave her an understanding and interest in inequality.

It was while practising as an optometrist in the Northern Territory that she discovered that few Aboriginal people would come to their clinics. She became keenly interested in the health of Australia’s first people and began working for the Northern Territory Aboriginal Eye Health Committee.

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Rohina Joshi: Improving access to healthcare via task-sharing between doctors & healthcare workers

By Neena Bhandari

Growing up on the Christian Medical College campus in Ludhiana [Punjab], Rohina Joshi knew very little about professions other than medicine. She would see her dietician mother educate her staff about the ill-effects of tobacco and her dentist father promote oral health among school children. The amalgamation of all these influences motivated her to enrol in medicine.

In the very first year, she became aware of the power of prevention and realised that one can actually prevent people from falling sick. By her third year in medical college, she was certain that she wanted to do public health or community medicine. She did a Master of Public Health degree from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram [Kerala].

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Anushka Patel: Quest for finding effective solutions to affordable healthcare

By Neena Bhandari

As a young girl, Anushka Patel would travel with her father, a respiratory physician working in the field of tuberculosis, to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Far North Queensland. She recalls being shocked to see a part of Australia that was akin to a developing country. It kindled her interest in working with disadvantaged populations and finding effective solutions to providing affordable healthcare.

She seriously began to consider medicine as an attractive career option during her high school years. After completing an undergraduate degree from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, she trained as a cardiologist in Sydney, before heading to Harvard University in Boston [USA] to pursue a Master of Science degree in Epidemiology.

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