News & Events

Date and location

Thursday, 12 October, 9am to 4 pm
University of Wollongong, Innovation Campus, Building 233, Room G12

Register Here

Overview

The Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values (ACHEEV) warmly welcomes you to a conversation about values in theoretical and empirical health research.

Values are a common object of academic attention in health research, but are conceptualised and theorised in many ways. Some disciplines offer deep theoretical resources for thinking about values: consider for example value theory in moral philosophy, or fact-value debates in the philosophy of science. In empirical research, the values of participants can be an implicit or explicit object of study, and are approached and understood differently by researchers from different disciplines. Some methodologies—such as deliberative democratic approaches—invite participants to make cooperative judgements about value trade-offs. Others may structure data collection to explicitly elicit values, or extract implied values from participant talk in analysis. Researchers then make decisions about how to report participant values, and about relating participant values to existing theory, and building conclusions. These issues and practices will be the focus of our conversation.  

Speakers

We are delighted to feature two keynote speakers at this year’s symposium.

Professor Kieran O’Doherty, University of Guelph, Canada: How should we understand values in deliberative contexts: Individual commitments, collective vision, or abstract principles? 

Dr Bryan Mukandi, University of Wollongong: On the imperative, and dangers, of non-conformity.

National and international colleagues, and members of the ACHEEV team, will present papers illustrating theoretical and empirical approaches to working with values. We will end the day with a panel discussion of the affordances of different methods for researching values, and an open conversation on the question: What do we mean when we say we are researching values?
While we will offer hybrid options, we strongly encourage you to attend in person if you can.

Note that the in-person meeting is on the Innovation Campus, not the main campus, of the University of Wollongong.

We look forward to welcoming you to Wollongong in October.

Date and location

Wednesday, 13 September, 2 pm to 3.30 pm
University of Wollongong, Building 29 Room G10

REGISTER FOR OUR SEMINAR

Overview

In this seminar offered by the Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, we will ask: how should researchers investigate issues that are beyond participants’ direct experience, or questions that are speculative? In this 90 minute seminar, each of our three speakers will provide an exemplar, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A.   

Chair

The session will be chaired by Dr Jane Williams

Speaker abstracts

Using a person-centred approach to research speculative problems in health: interviewing Australians about health technology assessment

Presented by: Dr Marcus Sellars

Health technology assessment (HTA) processes in Australia significantly impact healthcare decisions, including subsidized medicines, technologies, and services. Incorporating societal preferences into HTA decision-making has gained interest, but achieving this aim in practice is a challenge, given an individual’s preferences may vary depending on how the research questions are framed. The Tools for Outcomes Research to Measure and Value Child Health (TORCH) project aimed to address specific questions for Australian HTA bodies, focusing on the equivalence of health gains between children and adults, as well as the integration of normative values into HTA processes. To achieve this, we employed a person-centered approach, conducting semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 10 young people (aged 15-17) and 20 adults (18+) from the Australian general public. In contrast to a typical qualitative study, we provided participants with a pre-information survey 2-3 days prior to their interview, and initial insights from a related HTA process study were shared by the interviewer. This allowed participants to consider and engage more deeply with the research questions, resulting in a potentially more nuanced understanding of the issues and a more accurate picture of the public's views. For example, most participants were willing and able to engage with specific HTA concepts, discussing value for money and integration of normative values within existing HTA processes. Drawing on the philosophy of person-centered care, this talk will attempt to provide guidance on researching speculative problems in health, ensuring the relevancy and usability of outputs.

Using analogies to research speculative technology in healthcare: interviewing expert stakeholders about the future of healthcare AI.

Presented by: Dr Yves Saint James Aquino

This paper presents findings from in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders involved in the development, deployment and regulation of healthcare AI. Findings show participants tend to compare AI with existing medical products or devices to determine whether healthcare AI raises novel or unique ethical and regulatory issues. Preliminary analysis focuses on the limits and affordances of analogical reasoning in the context of emerging healthcare technologies.

Moving beyond deficit models in empirical research with publics about healthcare AI: reflections from a critical scoping review

Presented by: Emma K. Frost

In this presentation, I will discuss results from a critical scoping review examining the methodologies and outcomes of empirical research that sought public views on healthcare artificial intelligence (AI). We found that deficit models of public understanding still pervaded the field: authors often suggested that negative views and distrust toward AI amongst publics could be ‘fixed’ by strategies such as broader-reaching education. I will discuss methods for moving beyond deficit models and conducting research that encourages public engagement with complex and speculative issues like healthcare AI.

About the chair and speakers

Dr Jane Williams, Chair

Jane is a senior research fellow at the Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values (ACHEEV) at the University of Wollongong. She conducts interdisciplinary research focused on public health ethics problems, using empirical ethics and qualitative research methodologies.

Dr Marcus Sellars, Guest Speaker

Marcus is a Research Fellow (Qualitative Researcher) working on the MRFF funded The Tools for Outcomes Research to Measure and Value Child Health (TORCH) project within the Department of Health Services Research and Policy (DHSRP). He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney (Faculty of Medicine) in 2019. The overarching aim of his thesis was to improve advance care planning (ACP) for people with chronic kidney disease and involved both qualitative (semi-structured interviews, thematic synthesis of qualitative studies) and economic evaluation (cost-effectiveness analysis) methods. Marcus has training in psychology and expertise in qualitative research methods.

Dr Yves Saint James Aquino, Speaker

Yves is a physician and philosopher with expertise in applied ethics, empirical bioethics and philosophy of medicine. His current program of research focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of health and medicine.

Emma K. Frost, Speaker

Emma is a PhD Candidate at the Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values. Her PhD research focuses on public engagement in healthcare AI, with an emphasis on understanding how empirical methods can be designed to capture public views in challenging information landscapes.

Tuesday, 22 August 2023
11.00am Sydney time

Join via Zoom

Abstract

Criminal reoffending is a major policy challenge in relation to young people involved in the justice system. Various factors have been shown to predict reoffending, such as poor housing, school disengagement, poor family relationships, and poor cultural connectedness. Recent research has shown that poor health also has an important role in predicting reoffending, both in its own right, but also as an initial cause of other known predictors of offending, such as those listed above. This precipitative relationship between poor health and predictors of reoffending coheres with the experiences of case workers of the Queensland’s Department of Youth Justice. Therefore, in order to help reduce the risk of reoffending, the Department introduced the ‘Navigate Your Health’ program. Under the program, a nurse navigator is provided to all young people who have committed a crime, and have been given a non-custodial sentence. The nurse navigators provide health assessment, and facilitation and coordination of necessary health care. The novel aim of the Navigate Your Health program is to reduce the risk of reoffending by improving young people’s health. This paper reports on the preliminary results of the program. It shows that the provision of nurse navigators has led to improvements in the participants’ health and wellbeing. Importantly, it has also led to improvements in other known predictors of reoffending. This suggests that improving health of young people who offend may reduce risk reoffending in the longer term.

Speaker

Dr Sam Boyle
School of Law, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Biography

Sam Boyle is a member of the of the Australian Centre for Health Law Research at QUT.

His main interest is in mental health law. Sam has a particular interest in the intersection between medical and legal perspectives on compulsory treatment for mental illness. 

Sam’s QUT profile

View the recorded session: The Privacy Dilemma 

This webinar is presented by the Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values (ACHEEV) in collaboration with Health Consumers New South Wales.

Every day, people produce large amounts of health information about themselves through their interactions with health professionals, hospitals, and other government and non-government agencies. Beyond being a record of their health care, this information can be collated for a wide range of secondary uses, such as monitoring the quality of hospital services, researching the health needs of populations, and testing how well new treatments work.

There is broad public support for using health data in these ways. However, this support does not necessarily extend to sharing health data with private sector organisations such as pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, particularly if there is scope for commercial gain from such use.

In this webinar Belinda Fabrianesi and Professor Annette Braunack-Mayer of the University of Wollongong will present findings from two studies exploring what community members think about sharing our health data with the private sector. These presentations are followed by a discussion on consumer perspective led by Dr Anthony Brown from Health Consumers NSW.

Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values (ACHEEV) website

Health Consumers NSW website

View the recorded session: Will Healthcare Artificial Intelligence de-skill Clinicians?

Progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to transform the delivery of healthcare, including in screening and diagnosis. These AI tools promise to improve the accuracy and speed of results for patients, and to make clinical workflows more efficient and productive. However AI implementation also raises risks, including clinician deskilling: deterioration of the practical clinical skills, decision-making capacity, and diagnostic reasoning of human clinicians.

In this webinar, we present preliminary findings from our project The Algorithm Will See You Now (NHMRC Ideas Grant 1181960). The potential impact of healthcare AI on clinical skills was one of many topics covered in extended interviews with a wide range of professional stakeholders, including clinicians, developers, regulators, entrepreneurs, and consumer representatives. These conversations reveal the role stakeholders want AI to have in future healthcare provision, the ways they imagine this will interact with the skills of clinicians, and their judgements about whether this will be a good or a bad thing.

The presentation will be followed by responses from three expert panellists specialising respectively in quality and safety, clinical AI development, and medical education.

This webinar is organised by the Australian Centre for Health Engagement Society and Space, Evidence and Values (ACHEEV) in collaboration with the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAAiH)