Professor Sharon Goldfeld AM

Director

Professor Sharon Goldfeld is a paediatrician and Director, Centre for Community Child Health (CCCH) the Royal Children’s Hospital, Co-Group leader of Policy and Equity, and Theme Director, Population Health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

She has a decade of experience in state government as a senior policymaker in health and education including Principal Medical Advisor in the Victorian Department of Education and Training. Her research program is made up of complementary, synergistic, and cross-disciplinary streams of work focused on investigating, testing, and translating sustainable policy relevant solutions that eliminate inequities for Australia’s children. As an experienced policymaker, public health, and paediatric researcher she aims to ensure ongoing effective, rapid translation of research into the policy and service arena. Professor Goldfeld has recently received a King’s birthday honour for significant service to paediatric medicine as a clinician and academic, and to public health research.

Over her career she has successfully translated her research into service delivery and policy including the national implementation of Early Development Instrument. She now leads an innovative program focused on investigating, testing and translating sustainable policy relevant solutions that can eliminate inequities for Australia’s children.  

 

Experience

She leads numerous research and evaluation initiatives, including:

  • right@home — A randomised controlled trial of sustained nurse home visiting that aims to find out how the universal maternal and child health nursing service might be improved to better meet the needs of families living in adverse circumstances.
  • Kids in Communities Study — A national study investigating how community level factors impact children’s developmental outcomes. This study is specifically looking at the physical and social environment, socio-economic factors, access to services and governance.
  • Bowel and Bladder Dysfunction service reform at RCH — An important institutional collaboration that seeks to improve the service delivered to patients and their families at RCH through more timely and streamlined care.
  • Restacking the Odds — This project seeks to use a combination of data-driven, evidence-based and expert informed approaches to develop measurable best practice indicators for quality, quantity and participation for five key early childhood strategies – antenatal support, sustained nurse home visiting, early childhood education and care, parenting programs and the early years of school.
  • Changing Children's Chances — This project brings together leading national and international child equity researchers to map and identify potential modifiable points of policy and service intervention that can help to reduce early developmental inequities in Australian children.
  • Elucidating Pathways of Child Health Inequalities — An international collaboration established to compare inequalities across longitudinal cohorts.
  • Building Better Readers — A randomised controlled trial that will test the value of the MiniLit reading intervention for Year 1 students with low reading ability.
  • Healthier Wealthier Families: addressing child poverty through better healthcare systems.

Getting it Right from the Start: a project that seeks to evaluate whether a specifically-designed Response to Intervention (RTI) approach for oral language and literacy instruction targeted to the early years of school can improve children’s language and literacy, when compared with usual teaching practice.

Changing Children’s Learning Pathways: a project exploring the perspectives and practices of leadership, teachers and staff at Victorian primary schools who have been identified as demonstrating exemplar practice in supporting students with additional health and developmental needs.

Sharon is frequently invited to provide keynote and workshop presentations. Sharon has been invited, by the Health Minister, to assist with the formation of the National Action Plan for the Health of Children and Young People 2020 – 2030. 

 

Awards

  • In 2020 Sharon was awarded the inaugural Marles Medal in STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) for excellent and original research that led to outstanding achievement in research impact. She has received the medal for her leadership of the right@home study, a trial designed to build parenting capacity among disadvantaged parents.
  • Rue Wright Award for best community child health research (awarded at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians), 2010 and 2011
  • Inaugural Aileen Plant Award for contribution to Australian public health leadership and research (awarded jointly by the Public Health Association of Australia, the Australian Epidemiological Association, the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine and the Australian Health Promotion Association), 2008
  • Exam Medal for best performance (Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine), 2007
  • Creswick Foundation Travelling Fellowship, 2003
  • Harkness International Fellowship in Health Care Policy, 1999-2000

 

Contact

Email: [email protected]

Executive Assistant: Dalrene De Silva ([email protected])

Phone: +61 3 9345 4295

Professor Sharon Goldfeld AM