Lisa Sharwood, PhD
Senior Research Fellow, School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales
Q: What’s your background?
A: My first career was in Trauma Nursing (Emergency Department), through which I developed an interest in doing ‘something more’… I wanted to do something to slow or stop the flow of injuries into our Emergency Departments and help reduce the morbidity and mortality. Without really knowing how I would do this, I undertook a Masters in Public Health (Epidemiology), and worked in accident research, which showed me the possibilities of using research to aid injury prevention.
Q: How did you get into the linkage space?
A: From there I did my PhD at The George Institute, attended a presentation on the SAIL Databank by Professor Ronan Lyons – and I knew I had to work in big data to try and achieve my goals. Post doctorally I worked on a multi-state research project in traumatic spinal cord injury (NHMRC Partnership Project), via which I initiated a state-based data linkage project that would start my education in the linkage space. I also completed some courses in Health Economics to learn how to evaluate costing data for injury care and am currently part way through a Masters Health Data Science (UNSW) which is a fabulous course.
Q: What was some of your early linkage work? What are you working on now?
A: With funding from iCare, my early linkage work was using NSW Ambulance, Emergency Department, hospitalisations and deaths data to evaluate the costs of care for individuals with traumatic spinal cord injury. I estimated the influence on health system costs of variable health services pathways for these critical ill patients. This helped to inform the NSW specialist spinal cord service acute care guidelines. I also used geospatial mapping over the Ambulance data to profile pre-hospital transport and treatment decisions and assessed the impact of time from acute injury to definitive care on longer term outcomes. My team also used these data to look at the impact of pre-existing mental illness and substance use disorder on acute care treatment, complications, costs and longer-term outcomes including death.
My journey from here involved using NSW data linkage again to evaluate the impact of a suicide prevention intervention in several regions across the state (Black Dog Institute, UNSW), and then to the Royal Commission for Defence and Veteran Suicide as lead of data analytics. I was seconded to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) where I analyzed over 100M records – principally national Emergency Department data for this purpose. With these connections and experience I envisaged the project I have just received $2.98M MRFF (Australian Government) funding for – to establish the first National Injury Surveillance System for Actionable Research using Emergency Department data (NISAR-ED) for Australia.
The NISAR-ED project partners with the AIHW, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine and the Monash University Accident Research Centre and has a team of stellar team of highly accomplished researchers with domain and specialist expertise in relevant areas including injury epidemiology, prevention and management, family and domestic violence, child sexual abuse, law, implementation science, health services research, health economics, trauma care, allied health, product safety, self-harm and suicide research and prevention, population level surveillance and reporting, data linkage, machine learning and advanced analytics.
Q: How did you get involved with IPDLN?
A: I attended my first IPDLN conference in 2018 (Banff, Canada) and absolutely loved it! I knew I had found ‘my people’ and wanted to become as involved as I could. I sat on the Scientific Committee for the 2022 conference and was then elected to the Executive Committee with the 2024-25 Directorship. I am fortunate to have been invited as Keynote Speaker in this year’s conference – and will be sharing more information on the NISAR-ED project and the importance taking a One Health context for public health surveillance and prevention (see program).
Q: How do you see the future of population data linkage?
A: I am excited to see what the possibilities of projects like this can achieve for more timely identification of health and injury risks. With careful data governance, I believe that there is a wealth of untapped opportunities to inform prevention and evidence-based policy for public good. Data science has come a long way, but in some ways is only just beginning … I look forward to seeing where it goes next.