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 | Biography |  |
Research areas include Alzheimer's, dementia and the assessment of the care requirements of the elderly. Melinda Martin-Khan is an applied statistician and health services researcher in gerontology. She has entered research with a highly varied background in the "real world", which strengthens her ability to find practical solutions to common challenges. In particular, she has extensive experience in residential aged care. She is currently employed as a full-time research fellow for the Center for Research in Geriatric Medicine, The University of Queensland.
Her doctoral studies focused on using video-conferencing to enable people with memory disorders living in rural and remote centers to access city based specialists. She conducted this complex project with a great deal of enthusiasm and growing technical capability. The project was completed on time and to a high scientific standard. Her profile in telemedicine is growing and she is a regular reviewer for the journal Telemedicine and Telecare, along with participation as a member of Scientific Committees for telehealth conferences. She has published literature reviews and research projects in relation to telehealth and is currently co-investigator on two telehealth projects (in acute care and residential care).
In recent years Dr. Martin-Khan has moved the focus of her research to incorporate quality systems. These are particularly lacking in aged care in Australia, yet are sorely needed. The baby boom generation is aging. In 2020, the first baby boomer will arrive at age 75 years. Progressively, they will become the occupants of Australia's nursing homes and aged care programs. This cohort wishes to appraise services before they engage them. They are currently selecting services for their parents. Soon they will be making choices for themselves. They will look for objective evidence of effective, responsive and humane services. Unhappily, current systems are highly subjective or absent altogether.
Melinda has extensive experience now in development and testing of indicators for acute care settings and is transferring these to emergency medicine and long term care population issues. The methodology that has been used by Dr. Martin-Khan in the acute care setting has the potential to provide a far broader range of clinically relevant and patient centered indicators than are currently available. She co-supervises three PhD students with projects focused on acute care and emergency department care. Her work was funded by an Alzheimer's Australia Post-Doctoral Viertel Fellowship award.
Dr. Martin-Khan is involved in the work of the Dementia Collaborative Research Center (DCRC) - Early Detection and Prevention. As a result of funding, along with her co-investigators at UQ, have produced several reports and publications focused on general practice. Currently they are working on a project to provide options to the Department of Health and Aging on the adoption of a public health approach to early detection and prevention of dementia. Melinda is a steering committee member for the Queensland Health Statewide Dementia Clinical Network.
Dr. Martin-Khan has a key interest in epidemiology and bio-statistics. Her work in telemedicine has established the standard for research design and analysis of observer agreement studies. She traveled to Boston in 2010 to work with statisticians at Harvard Medical School to develop and bring to Australia specific methods of risk adjustment for the reporting of quality indicators at a national level.
Melinda has academic qualifications in health sciences, statistics, education, business (accounting) and management. She graduated from the School of Medicine (UQ) with a doctorate in December 2009. Relative to opportunity, Melinda demonstrates a well rounded academic career with several well developed research themes. She has experience in project management, grant writing, publication and dissemination of research findings to the lay and scientific communities.
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