The Embedded PhD

2014-2021

In 2014 I established a Health CoDesign Network, which included Cancer Hospitals in Victoria and NSW, focussed upon enhancing Health CoDesign Practices within Hospital Settings. In 2016 I was appointed Senior Lecturer at Austin Hospital for a three-year term. In this role I developed a project titled “The End” focussed upon exploring the ways of speaking about Death within Hospital settings. A PhD candidate identified in 2017, commenced work a few years later to imagine and develop cultural probes (tools, apps and affordances) that facilitated improved hospital practices on the speaking about death. 

2016-2021

As a recipient of two Cancer Australia Grants, I worked within Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, between 2017-2020, focussed upon delivering peer-to-peer knowledge sharing affordances within communities of Pancreatic Cancer (PanSupport) and elderly patients with cancer (WeCan). In 2018 I pitched a proposition to Baker Institute aligned with the “Keeping Australians out of Hospital” initiative of the Department of Health. The pitch defined a two category and seven themes orientated strategy of undertaking evidence–based research to develop commercializable design solutions, products and services, aimed at improving the quality of life for people with chronic, and complex, conditions and keep them out of hospital. Established in 2018 the project activated professional networks to identify prospective PhD candidates who could deliver on a hospital embedded and patient orientated research program focussed upon new IP creation. The three PhDs that commenced work in 2020 now have well developed projects where the commercial viability of the propositions is being discussed with potential manufacturers and new industry partners. Drawing inspiration from the Stanford BioDesign Program for medical device development and from The RMIT Accelerator, the capacity development ecology purpose built for this project provides the PhD candidates a clear and deliberate access to the community of practice of this work. What has ignited their passion and has visibly transformed their day-to-day practices, as seen by the continual peer to peer collaboration and support within MSTeams Project space, is this sense of a Mission.

2018~

The Second Pancreas Project has been proposed as a mission project with a clear ambition to save lives and to improve health outcomes by activating the agency of patients, through product and service affordances. Within the context of chronic medical management the vision of this project breaks new ground by taking the hospital and clinician into the homes of the patients. While the medical practitioner is the expert overseeing the care of the patient, the ambit of influence of the clinician’s ends at the door of the consulting room when the patient leaves the clinic. While the medical practitioner can inveigle the patient to practice high quality self-care of the body they possess, it is seldom possible to coach, support and interact in the time period between the half yearly consultations. The proposed technology enabled self-care affordances have the potential to change that by making data, iOT devices, and peer to peer networks available to the patient as active and activated partners in their self-managed program of care.

Critical to the performance of the research program has been the ability of the project to have access to a cadre of high performing researchers. Using an intensive outreach program of looking for prospective researchers, identifying the high performers among the applicants and focussing upon candidates with a track record of delivering on projects has enabled the project to change the way boundaries of health care are drawn. The identification of high calibre candidates has also been very carefully conducted to ensure that the researchers gain access to the highly competitive scholarship pool of the university. The project team has participated in the identification of additional researchers, the development of the selected researchers’ understanding of the mission of this project and their alignment with a project thematic has been discussed, defined and clarified towards the development of a research proposal and application. Currently there is one applicant in the system, awaiting the result of her scholarship process outcome, and there are three additional applicants ready to submit their applications in July and October 2022 round. The project has also been included in a recent ARC 2022 - ITTC submission. This effectively enacts the embedding of researchers into the seven distinct project themes.

2020-2021 Supporting PhD researchers during Lockdown

During the two years of lockdowns the project migrated online into a robust use of Teams to enact a Virtual Laboratory of peer-to-peer engagement among the researchers. Supporting the researchers, defining the intellectual capacity this Laboratory, was the supervisory team that provided care and stimulation to the researchers. Lead by and in addition to, Dr Neale Cohen, the Head of Research at Baker Institute (Alfred Hospital), and Soumitri Varadarajan, the project supervisory team comprises five academic staff from the School of Design. 

Enabling patient agency

Focussed upon delivering long range impacts, the project has carefully worked to stay true to a patient centred mission statement of producing a diverse ecology of technologically enabled solutions that constitute an ecology of an external body part the Second Pancreas. Key to the Mission of the project has been the shift away from public health and medical discourses that exclude the agency of the patient in the determining of bodily care practices. The vision and the long-range impact this project aims to have both through the solutions and through the demonstration of effectiveness of the methodologies implemented is in the ways of undertaking health care focussed design research. Specifically in the activation of the agency of the patient through their ownership of their unique personal digital health ecologies.

• A desire to produce outcomes that have a capacity; to be commercialised at scale so as to reach a low-SES demographic in the global south.

• A program of globally focussed research program that is deliberately independent of local health funding priorities.