Welcome Rachel O'Loughlin

Rachel O’Loughlin has recently joined the Child Health Economics Unit within Melbourne Health Economics as a Research Fellow. She is working with Prof Kim Dalziel, Dr Li Huang, A/Prof Brad Astbury, and Prof Harriet Hiscock across a number of projects in partnership with Safer Care Victoria and the Health Services and Economics Group at The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and The Royal Children’s Hospital. Her role includes collaborative work with people with lived experience of mental health challenges; using best-worst scaling to understand consumer priorities for evaluation and measurement in mental healthcare; and conducting a range of economic evaluations of health service programs spanning maternity and perinatal care, childhood asthma management, epilepsy surgery, and community-based care for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Rachel has a Bachelor of Commerce (Economics and International Business) from the University of Sydney, Graduate degrees in Psychology (University of Melbourne), and her PhD Thesis titled ‘Understanding value in children’s mental healthcare’ is currently under review (University of Melbourne). Her research interests include the complexities of measuring children’s health-related quality of life, particularly in the context of mental health challenges; the health policy and practice implications of healthcare interventions; how we define and measure the value of mental healthcare; and how we can use this information to improve the quality of children’s healthcare in Australia.