Newsletter | Issue 1 | 2025
Welcome from the Head of Department
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the first edition of the Department of General Practice and Primary Care newsletter for 2025.
Primary care workforce shortages and election promises are in the news as we lead into an election cycle. I was initially pleased to hear bipartisan support for free GP care until I took time to realise the extra funding being suggested was not going to be enough to enable free universal access to GPs or to enable team-based care. We need more evidence-based guidance for policy makers.
Everything seems to ramp up a notch when March comes around. Research grant submissions are soon due, and students are back, filling the foyers and lecture theatres with excited snatches of conversation. The demolition of the Brownless Library is complete, although we are left with a rather large hole while we wait for the new Place for Indigenous Art and Culture to be created. We have hosted a few international visitors. A/Prof Andrew Pinto, Ms Jane Zhao, and Prof Jeff Kwong from the University of Toronto, Department of Family and Community Medicine recently gave fascinating presentations on the Upstream Lab, practice-based research networks, the use of comics to communicate findings and the power of linking data to understand the uptake of vaccines and impact on the spread and severity of disease. Dr Caroline Kappelin is visiting us from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Caroline is in the final year of her PhD on improving wellbeing for people with mental ill-health and multiple health conditions. She will be working closely with the ALIVE team during her two-month stay.
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce and welcome A/Prof Kylie Vuong as the newest member of the Department of General Practice and Primary Care. Kylie is an experienced general practitioner who brings an exceptional track record in research, teaching and leadership roles. She completed her PhD on Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention and developed a melanoma risk prediction model based on self-assessed risk factors that has been adopted by the Melanoma Institute of Australia as an online melanoma prediction tool. Most recently, she has served as the Academic Lead in General Practice at Griffith University and holds an appointment as an Adjunct Associate Professor at UNSW. I am extremely excited that Kylie will be joining us and hope you will all join me in making her feel welcome.
Lastly, I am pleased to announce that Dr Jimmy Tseng is the recipient of the 2025 Dr Leon Carp Award. Jimmy is currently working as a GP at Princess Park Clinic in Shepparton as well as being a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Rural Health. The focus of his research project will be asthma intervention and management in high schools so I am looking forward to supervising and supporting him as he navigates the adolescent health space.
In this issue, you will find an article on the new National Multidisciplinary Primary Care Research, Policy and Advocacy Consortium led by Professor Michael Kidd, UNSW. This is a collaboration between 20 universities and 100 primary care researchers across Australia, including us, that will strengthen the evidence base on primary care service delivery and outcomes as well as accelerating the translation of knowledge into improvements in clinical care. It’s an exciting project and I encourage you to check it out.
Following this, the D4D team share a new PATRON publication that analyses the effectiveness of using US tertiary care transformers compared with purpose-built anonymisation tools, the Teaching and Learning team provide an update and we farewell Dr Helen Malcolm, who has retired from the Rural Clinical School after many years of service.
You can find these and many more articles inside.
Warm regards,
Lena