About UC-HRI

Hi, my name is Nerida Volker. I’m a dietician by trade, I’ve been a dietician for about 20 years.
I’m currently a phd student and lecture here at the university of Canberra. 
My main research was around the Heart Link project and that was a project looking at how to identify people who are at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke and looking how we would better support them. 
I guess that research came about because in health we have a lot of evidence about what works.
Often the frustration though is the evidence is often not translated into everyday practice.
So we really wanted to look particularly at cardio vascular disease, because as a chronic disease these are big burdens to our community, people in our community, but also increasingly to our health budget as well. 
So we wanted to look at how we could take the evidence we know of how best to manage people with high risk of having a heart attack or stroke and see if we could develop an intervention to see if we could reduce that risk. 
We also identified a range of differt issues around the skills of GPs, practice nurses and allied health professionals around supporting behaviour change, so they’re certainly some other things that we would look at doing
We need to collaborate with disciplines across a range of different professions so we need a multidisciplinary approach, but you also need a intersectoral approach as well. 
We need the skills from a range of different people all coming together to work on these complex problems.
So the health institute provides a great opportunity, a catalyst if you like, to bring everybody together, to bring all of those stakeholders who we know need to be engaged umm to share their skills and expertise and their passions and then work with community.
I know in the pilot study that we did we really had some very powerful outcomes.
We really made quite a big difference to their lives and I think that’s why at the end of the day all of us are involved in this type of research and working in the health arena.