Professor D’Arcy Holman

D’Arcy Holman graduated in Medicine from The University of Western Australia in 1979 with his first international publication in press with the International Journal of Cancer.

Upon his return to Perth he established the Epidemiology Branch of the Health Department of Western Australia as inaugural Director and, in 1988, became the Assistant Commissioner for Planning. He was responsible for turning WA’s administrative health data into knowledge to influence policy and practice. His work as Director of Epidemiology, including Scientific Editor of Our State of Health, an overview of health and illness in the WA population, provided the epidemiologic foundation for WA’s internationally acclaimed health promotion programs of the 1980s. On the national scene he became first author of Australia’s first official statistics on deaths and illness caused by tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs. He also played significant roles in program design and evaluation with respect to Aboriginal environmental health, HIV infection, hepatitis B, childhood immunisation, mammographic and cervical cancer screening and reproductive technology. For example, his work on environmental health in remote Aboriginal communities resulted in large injections of infrastructure funds and his research on hepatitis B brought forward the control program in the same communities by two decades. As Assistant Commissioner and later as a Commissioner’s Special Consultant, he was responsible for major reviews and reforms of community and child health services, accident and emergency services and residential care services in WA. Most of these reforms were motivated by his commitment to social justice, with a special focus on areas of need in socially depressed locales, such as the young head-injured in Perth’s most disadvantaged suburbs. He prepared the Health Department’s first program-based strategic plan, A Plan for Health, noted for its then innovative consumer focus and emphasis on addressing health needs at the population level.

From 1992, as Director of UWA’s Health Promotion Development and Evaluation Program, he led a multidisciplinary research team of social and behavioural scientists and epidemiologists responsible for an independent three-year evaluation of the newly created WA Health Promotion Foundation. The system of evaluation was subsequently profiled by the Auditor General as an example of best practice in performance measurement of a public sector organisation. For this work he received the Inaugural Healthway Award from the Minister for Health for Innovation and Best Practice in Health Promotion.

a program of professional and community development on Genomics, Society and Human Health spanning ethics, the humanities, public health, clinical medicine and molecular biology. In all these initiatives, the hallmarks of his approach have been visionary innovation; an exceptional commitment to multidisciplinary principles (for example, all health science students complete double majors in public health and a science area, while one third in the double degree program also complete a major in commerce or economics); and always the guiding light of ‘what’s best for the community’, His leadership role in the creation of the entire undergraduate health science program at UWA has been acknowledged by the principal prizes in the course bearing his name.

Professor Holman, his research co-workers and students have published extensively in health services research, health promotion program evaluation, and the epidemiology, prevention and treatment of chronic and communicable diseases. His present research interests focus on the study of utilisation and outcomes of health care, particularly applications of record linkage and spatial analysis and the evaluation of hospital and community-based health interventions, with a particular interest in issues concerning social justice and inequalities in health and health services. His work with his PhD students on physical illness in people with mental disorders (the Duty to Care study) and social and locational inequalities in access to cancer services have been cited at length by high level social justice reviews, including the Australian Senate’s inquiry into services and treatment options for people with cancer which engaged him as their adviser. His Duty to Care work led to the ‘HealthRight’ program to improve access of the mentally ill to primary health care as well as a new section in the Mental Health Act (WA) on discharge planning.

The world class WA Data Linkage Project was instigated by Professor Holman in 1995 as a joint venture of UWA, Curtin University, the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and the Health Department of WA, with an infrastructure grant from the WA Lotteries Commission. The system links together health records for the entire population of the State, going back to the 1960s, on deaths, hospital episodes, mental health services, perinatal events, cancers and many other administrative and research databases. It is a national icon, unique in Australia and one of only six comprehensive systems of its type in the world. Results of research based on record linkage in WA are having an immediate impact on the health system, in areas from the quality of surgical care to better health outcomes for people with mental disorders. His research team includes a consumer liaison officer, the first in Australia appointed to an academic school of population health, ensuring that research priorities are influenced by consumer priorities and that results are disseminated in a form suitable for health care consumers and the general public. The WA Data Linkage System has also achieved a major contribution to the protection of patient privacy in population health research by reducing the necessity for researcher access to name-identified health data. Professor Holman worked tirelessly behind the scenes for six years to achieve the nation’s first all-population linkage of Commonwealth and state health data since federation. This extraordinary health system resource, linking Medicare, pharmaceutical benefit and aged care data with a state’s hospital morbidity, cancer, perinatal and death data has become the desirable model for emulation in other Australian states, and in 2005, Professor Holman led a team of consultants commissioned by the Sax Institute to advise on introduction of a similar system in New South Wales.

Professor Holman published works number over 380, including over 230 full-length, peer-reviewed journal articles reporting original research results. Citations of his works number well over 3,000 and some 30 of his articles fall into NHMRC’s ‘highly cited paper’ category. His competitive grant earnings exceed $30 million, including an extended five-year project grant ranked in category 7, the highest rank assigned by the NHMRC, and several program and enabling grants including CIA on an NHMRC Population Health Research Capacity Building Grant, CIC on a NHMRC Health Services Research Program Grant, and CIA on a State-based Centre of Excellence grant for Science and Innovation. In 2002, he was awarded Australia’s first Population Health Research Capacity Building Grant. He has made significant contributions to population health research training in Australia through national courses in linked health data analysis and public health leadership taught by invitation in every mainland state and territory and successfully supervising over 30 graduate research students and post-doctoral fellows. Professor Holman is renowned for his mentorship with many of his former students winning prizes, going on to head health agencies or achieving professorial rank.

Professor Holman has served on both the policy and research arms of NHMRC. He has represented WA on Council, was Chair of the Health Advancement Standing Committee and an Executive Member of the National Health Advisory Committee during the 1994-96 triennium and has served on numerous working parties and reviews for NHMRC, the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. He was the AIHW board member with expertise in public health research for two terms. He has chaired several NHMRC regional grants interviewing committees, discipline panels and grant review groups in public health and related research disciplines, has served on the NHMRC Program Grants Committee and was recently appointed as the public health expert to the NHMRC’s principal Research Committee. He has worked with WHO, has been a member of review panels for the New Zealand Health Research Council and, in 2006, the panel for the review of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.

Professor Holman has active research collaborations in the People’s Republic of China and was appointed, in 2006, as Permanent Guest Professor at the School of Medicine of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

Professor Holman is a former State President of PHAA, in which he has been an active member since 1980, foundation Fellow of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine, an overseas Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology and was awarded Fellowship of the Australian Institute of Management in recognition of his contributions to the leadership of health organisations and the development of leadership skills in health practitioners. Professor Holman is and has been chairperson or member of a vast number of Boards and committees in Western Australia, nationally and internationally. He is a director of HBF Health Inc. and board chairman of Healthguard Inc. (both large not-for-profit health insurers) and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is also a law student at Murdoch University and well on the way to completion of the graduate LLB. His advice and comments on health issues are frequently sought by the media.

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