Meet Professor Debra Anderson, Dean of UTS Faculty of Health

You’ve worked really broadly across the university sector – your previous appointments include several years as a Professor of Nursing at QUT, leading the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Griffith University, and visiting and guest appointments at the Kings College London and Peking University. With such diverse experiences behind you, what drew you to UTS?

UTS is a really young, vibrant university that has very strong world rankings. I was really excited to be able to work with an agile, young university where there’s an opportunity to create and embrace change. The role of Dean is a great opportunity to lead the Faculty, and set us up to embrace the new chapter that we’re seeing in health in the wake of COVID-19.

You started out as a clinician before moving into academia. Why did you choose a career in research?

I’m a registered nurse and I’ve also got a background in human movement studies, as well as a PhD in social and preventative medicine. During my PhD, I started doing research in women’s health and I loved it – that was really my inspiration to pursue an academic career. I felt that I could reach more people through research than I could as a clinician.

Your own research interests are strongly centred on women’s health. Tell us about some of your major pieces of work.

I’m Director of the Women’s Wellness Research Collaborative, a research initiative that spans several universities and targets those chronic disease risk factors and lifestyle risk factors that are specific to women’s health. We work with women from midlife, women after cancer, women with diabetes and young women, pulling together the latest evidence and developing interventions that help women improve their health-related quality of life. We have 16 funded projects spanning six countries, including Australia, Vietnam, the UK, Hong Kong and New Zealand. I’m also a CI on InterLACE, an international collaboration that takes a life course approach to reproductive health in women. It’s one of the largest women’s health studies in the world. 

Speaking of research, what are your research goals for the Faculty?

I was the Associate Dean, Research for the Faculty from 2019–2021, and during this time I worked with colleagues to design the Health Research Institute, which we’re hoping to launch later this year. The Institute will pull together all those key areas and centres of research impact within the Faculty, such as palliative care and chronic disease, health economics and aged care. We’ll still have our existing faculty research centres but they’ll all be part of the Health Research Institute. We’ll combine forces with other university partners to represent our research to external partners and really be able to engage with them.

The Faculty has huge potential to build stronger, deeper connections across the health sector and embrace our partners not only in Sydney, but at national and global levels. To really have those strong partnerships, that strong engagement, is crucial to building our influence and impact across the sector and ensuring that our teaching and research is connected, evidence based and meaningful.

Debra Anderson
Dean, UTS Faculty of Health 

What’s your vision for teaching and learning?

At UTS Health, our research is embedded in our teaching. Our extensive professional connections mean we can pull in the experts to teach into the courses – these are people who are also researching the field and writing the books. And we need to leverage that: it’s only together, in teaching and research, that we can really make a difference. Deepening that integration between the two is really going to be a key flagship of what I’ll be doing in the next few years.

What else is on the agenda for you as Dean?

I think the other part of the vision is about engagement. The Faculty has huge potential to build stronger, deeper connections across the health sector and embrace our partners not only in Sydney, but at national and global levels. To really have those strong partnerships, that strong engagement, is crucial to building our influence and impact across the sector and ensuring that our teaching and research is connected, evidence based and meaningful.

Health professionals have been on the front line of COVID-19. How do you think the pandemic has shaped the sector – and how has the Faculty responded to these challenges? 

It’s been tremendous for people to recognise and understand the importance of the health sector for society. I think there’s going to be more emphasis on ensuring that healthcare providers receive the best education and support possible. At UTS, we immediately started undertaking research in the COVID area – everything from psychosocial support for health workers to best practice in nursing care. Our clinical practice with our students also changed: we’re now looking at giving them opportunities to learn how to care for COVID patients, because this is the new reality of working in health.

The pandemic is just one of a number of major challenges facing the health sector right now. What else is on the horizon?

Beyond the pandemic, which is still ongoing, the other huge area is chronic disease. Those risk factors of lack of exercise, poor diet, stress, alcohol consumption, smoking – those are the things that are consistent across many countries. Health inequity is another major concern. We’re already seeing huge disparities between the developing and developed countries in terms of health outcomes and the quality of health care being provided. At UTS we have tremendous opportunity to impact on these major challenges through our world class education and research, pulling together our strengths in these areas.

These are major challenges, but they also present some exciting opportunities for people considering a health care career. What would you say to someone thinking about enrolling in a health degree at UTS?

Our courses are now so popular that one in three people want to be a health professional. I see this as a great thing – the world is your oyster if you come and do a health degree, and UTS is an awesome place to do it. Your degree will give you the base of a particular occupation, be it physiotherapy or clinical psychology or nursing or midwifery, but what you’ll also find is that then a lot of doors will open for you. We have graduates who are working with the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and on incredible health projects in countries around the world. A health career offers enormous opportunities and incredible diversity.