Dr Alan Clough
Portfolio and curriculum vitae
This portfolio briefly describes my career as a public health researcher and outlines my skills in law and dispute resolution in the workplace, health law and family law contexts. The portfolio also describes my interests in the role of digital technologies in healthcare, clinical legal education and in alternative models to enhance knowledge about the law and access to legal services in the community.
Profile
A career in public health research and advocacy at the population level
Over the past three decades, my National Health and Medical Research Council-funded research in social epidemiology has examined the effects of public health interventions to address substance misuse and mental health issues. My work is akin to what legal researchers characterise as ‘legal epidemiology’ since most of my studies have evaluated legal or policy interventions at the population level.
First Nations – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians - and other disadvantaged and marginalised populations living in northern Australia, have been the focus.
More recently, since 2017, when Queensland's Parliament enacted its mental health legislative reforms, my research has focused on the triggers for police, ambulance and emergency department involvement in mental health issues. Much information about critical mental health episodes in the community is lost because of a lack of system interoperability between siloed emergency response systems, despite Queensland’s strong digital health reform ambitions. Accordingly, I have a growing interest in digital health and its capacity to provide streamlined access to critical patient information across these silos.
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Career re-direction towards an individual client focus
Population level interventions seldom make measurable differences in the lives of more vulnerable community members, particularly those with complex needs arising from the strong co-morbidity of substance misuse and mental health issues. Patients with complex needs are particularly challenging for health systems. Such patients are often overlooked, marginalised and under-served, particularly in the mental health system, and there is a disturbing lack of accountability for their humane management, treatment and care.
Dissatisfied with this situation, I have moved towards an individual client level focus in my work, away from a population-level research focus. Accordingly, I have studied law and dispute resolution. Health law and practice, with a digital health focus, and dispute resolution are my chosen specialisms.