Virginia Mumford

I am an applied health economist at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI). I joined Macquarie University as a post-doctoral Fellow after being awarded my PhD in 2015 by UNSW, and was promoted to Research Fellow in 2018. I have a unique profile through my previous experience in medicine, financial accounting, investment banking, and regulatory compliance. I qualified as a doctor in 1982 and worked in acute care before changing to a career in finance. I was awarded an MBA in 1987 while working as a financial trader in London, and an MHA in 2006 while working in investment banking in Hong Kong. In 2011 I decided to combine my interests in health and finance through pursuing an academic career in health economics.

My research has used applied health economics, econometrics and implementation science techniques to investigate and evaluate complex interventions across a wide range of health service settings: clinical governance (hospital accreditation), clinical issues (delirium, refractory epilepsy, and motor neurone disease), and medical informatics (electronic medication management systems, and point-of-care testing in rural hospitals).

I have established a strong research output with 26 published peer-reviewed papers, including 8 as first author, since 2011. I am currently evaluating the Delirium Clinical Care Standard in acute care for my NSW Health EMC Fellowship. I hold an Adjunct Senior Lecturer position at the University of Tasmania, and worked at the Centre for Health Economic Research Evaluation at the University of Technology, Sydney during my PhD.

The nature health economics research means that I need to build strong collaborative partnerships to plan and execute projects. This has been aided by my corporate experience in running a global business, and is evidenced by the wide range of grants I have been invited to contribute to. My 10-year goal is to develop a multi-disciplinary research unit to develop successful, evidence based, strategies for implementing patient safety and quality improvements in health care, and establish a robust economic evaluation framework for assessing the longer term impacts of these interventions.