Dame Kate Campbell Fellowships awarded to Kim Dalziel and Marie Bismark, Centre for Health Policy

The Centre for Health Policy (CHP) was delighted to learn that two of our colleagues – Associate Professor Kim Dalziel and Dr Marie Bismark - have been awarded prestigious Dame Kate Campbell Fellowships, in recognition of research excellence within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Science (MDHS) at the University of Melbourne.

Dame Kate Campbell was born on in Melbourne in 1899 and graduated from medical school at the University of Melbourne (MB, BS, 1922; MD, 1924). She was among the top twelve students in her class and was a gifted diagnostician and committed clinician. As a woman, she encountered very considerable obstacles and discrimination. However, her perseverance, tenacity and talent led to a brilliant career as a specialist in child and maternal health which yielded a number of important contributions to medicine. Most notably, her research established that excess therapeutic oxygen lay behind acquired retrolental fibroplasia —a condition that could lead to blindness among premature babies.

It is therefore seems particularly apt that these 2019 Dame Kate Campbell fellowships have been awarded to Kim and Marie. Kim’s research focuses on the application of health economics to health care for children. Marie’s research has had an important impact of avoiding adverse impacts in medicine.  I think if Dame Campbell were with us, she would approve. Read on, to find out more about their research.

Professor Nancy Devlin, Director of the Centre for Health Policy

Marie Bismark

Dr Marie Bismark is a public health physician and legal academic, who leads the Law and Public Health Group in the Centre for Health Policy at the University of Melbourne. Marie’s research focuses on the role of patient voice in improving the quality and safety of healthcare. She is also passionate about the wellbeing of health practitioners and has published on gender discrimination in medicine and suicide by doctors. Her work has been published in leading journals including NEJM, Health Affairs, MJA, and BMJ Quality and Safety.

In addition to her academic work, Marie works part-time as a medical practitioner with North Western Mental Health and serves as a non-executive director of GMHBA insurance and Summerset aged care. These roles give Marie a unique vantage point on the Australian health care system, spanning academia and clinical practice, public and private sectors, funding and provision, bedside care and boardroom leadership.

In 2004-2005 Marie completed a Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy at Harvard University, and she continues to collaborate closely with her Harkness mentor Professor David Studdert.

Marie and her husband Matthew have three teenage children.

“Dame Kate Campbell has been an inspiration to me in so many ways: she was renowned for her clinical sensitivity and for her epidemiological curiosity. She had a strong sense of fairness, and in 1923 she left a Melbourne hospital due to gender discrimination. Dame Kate went on to discover that blindness in premature babies was caused by high concentrations of oxygen: a discovery that changed the lives of countless babies and their families.

This Fellowship will allow me to continue my research at the interface of practitioner wellbeing and patient safety. Following in Dame Kate’s footsteps, I hope to prevent adverse events in medicine and to support clinicians to bridge the quality chasm that exists between best-practice evidence and the realities of bedside clinical practice.”

Kim Dalziel

Associate Professor Kim Dalziel is a Health Economist leading a program of research in child health in the Health Economics Unit in the Centre for Health Policy. Her research has a strategic focus on the use of health economics to support clinical innovation at The University of Melbourne and with Melbourne Partners. Kim leads economic evaluation alongside clinical studies in areas such as neonatal medicine, congenital heart disease, childhood allergy, cancer infection, and emergency medicine. Her research promotes advancement of child health measurement to support economic evaluation along with advancing clinical trial and cost-effectiveness methods. For example, she is researching important differences in child and parent valuations using the quality of life instrument EQ-5D-Y for children and progressing use of the PedsQL instrument for economic evaluation in US. She additionally leads a program of research in child health policy focusing on how health systems meet the needs of vulnerable children, the design and financing of the health system for children and health technology assessment. For example, she is researching trends in expenditure for children with special health care needs in the US and the impact of price, volume and disease prevalence to better understand health care efficiency.

“The Dame Kate Campbell Fellowship is a great honor and important validation of my work across the Melbourne University Clinical Networks. I will use the fellowship to continue to build capacity in child health economics and to further methods work in child health measurement. Dame Kate Campbell is a great inspiration in her pioneering work in the area of neonatal medicine and her achievements in the face of discrimination. I hope to make great use of this fellowship in her name and the opportunity afforded me.”