Health literacy, health inequalities, social epidemiology, health service research, translational research, research capacity building, cardiovascular disease, chronic disease, obesity, longitudinal tracking of rural health workforce

Dr Alison Beauchamp is Associate Professor in the School of Rural Health at Monash University. She has a clinical background as a Registered Nurse with expertise in cardiac care. Alison is currently a NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow (commenced 2021), with this grant exploring the role of health literacy in cardiac secondary prevention. She completed a NHMRC PhD scholarship at Monash in 2011 with her thesis exploring social inequalities in heart disease. She has previously held an Australian Research Council post-doctoral Industry Fellowship at Deakin University, where she managed the large Optimising Health Literacy (Ophelia) study in which she supported clinicians to co-design health literacy interventions. In 2018, Alison was awarded a NHMRC Translational Research into Practice (TRIP) Fellowship to implement health literacy strategies in clinical settings. She has co-designed several online resources for clinicians (http://teachback.org/) and consumers https://checkback.org/ to improve communication in clinical settings.

Alison has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and 3 book chapters. She has been an invited or keynote speaker at 8 international or national conferences, and lead or co-investigator on grants totalling over $7 million AUD. She currently supervises 3 PhD scholars and has co-supervised 3 PhD and 4 honours students to successful completion.

Areas of research

1. Health literacy and the equitable provision of health service interventions.
2. Social epidemiology, including inequalities in cardiac outcomes.
3. Building research capacity within rural health services.

Supervision interests

A key interest is the co-design and application of health literacy interventions with health services, consumers and practitioners. I am especially interested in the role of health literacy in reducing health inequalities, and aim to develop practical tools that support the application of health literacy within health care. Clinical interests related to health literacy include cardiac secondary prevention and rehabilitation, musculoskeletal conditions, and breast cancer screening.

A second area of research is working with health services and practitioners to build capacity in research and evaluation, including the use of implementation science methods to support translation of evidence-based strategies into routine care.