Associate Professor Martin Jones

Since arriving in rural Australia ten years ago, I have had the privilege to be part of a leadership team which has doubled our rural student placement activity, increased our interprofessional educational activity to support rural students and doubled the number of Major Training Site (MTS) in South Australia from four to eight. In addition, I have helped increase the number and quality of UDRH research outputs in regional South Australia and designed new innovative educational models for the existing rural health workforce. I have held National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) grants arriving in the UK, and worked with academics in the UK, Australia, China, and the European Union. I have undertaken randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, and created hypothesis through interviewing patients, families, and health care workers. These activities have generated over $2M in research grant funding. Funding sources have been European, Primary Health Network, Commonwealth, and community partners located in rural and remote Australia. I have published over 100 journal articles in collaboration with partners in Australia and overseas. In the UK in my previous two roles, I was responsible for a budget of 200 million GBP to deliver a nursing service. I was accountable for the safety, quality, and effectiveness of that service. My approach included working with my financial colleagues to ensure the nursing resource was spent within its allocated budget. I have held NHS leadership roles serving diverse and underserved communities in inner-city London. I have held national roles in assessing the quality of NHS governance structures supporting the National NHS Clinical Governance Regulator.

RESEARCH OUTPUTS

I have provided a leadership role increase clinical trial activity in partnership with regional communities by developing a portfolio of clinical trials in partnership with the Australian Tele Trial Program (ATP). We are currently progressing three ATP clinical trials exploring how we can increase access to an evidenced based low intensity intervention, in a variety of rural settings. Find out more here about our trial in the prisons, with a NGO, or mental health. I have built a team to make publicly available data sources meaningful for policy makers, educational providers and researchers through developing an interactive dashboard to support policy makers, students on placements and researchers’ information about the health and well-being of communities in rural South Australia based on Statistical Areas Level 2 (SA2) and SA3. I have provided leadership to help facilitate cross university research collaboration to understand rural health workforce outcomes. I worked with UniSA to support UniSA DRH to join the Nursing and Allied Health Graduate Outcome Tracking (NAHGOT) research collaboration. NAHGOT links Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency’s (AHPRA) practice location data (the outcome) with university administrative records (explanatory variables including placement location and duration) and is complemented by the national Student Experience and Graduate Outcomes Surveys. NAHGOT now formally has six universities involved across four Australian states (SA, VIC, NSW, QLD).   To read our publication tracking three allied health disciplines, click here. I am an active member of Australian Rural Health Education Network. In this role I was chair of the ARHEN network for two years, 2017-2019. In 2020 I led a team of academics to synthesize all UDRH publications over the last ten years for the KBC evaluation of the RHMT program. In 2021 I conducted a review of policy evaluations other countries have adopted to address rural health workforce distribution in partnership with six other UDRH, the paper was published in Medical Journal of Australia in 2022. In 2023, I was asked by the Rural Health Commissioner with four other DRH Directors to author a paper for a Medical Journal of Australia special edition to review DRH primary research. In the UK, I initiated a program of research aimed at understanding the role of Mental Health Nurses who prescribe mental health medicines and what structures may be required to sustain this new way of working.

Key outputs of this program of research have been:

1.      Several case studies modeling the role of a Mental Health Nurse who prescribes mental health medicines.

2.      Interviews with patients, psychiatrists, and mental health nurses regarding their experiences of mental health nurse prescribing.

3.      Providing expert Mental Health Nurse opinion for a novel antipsychotic treatment.

4.      Testing a program of psychopharmacology training to increase the knowledge of Mental Health Nurses to safely prescribe medication.

5.      Extending our understanding of Mental Health Nurses prescribing to rural Australia and Qatar.

I have taken a leadership role in increasing access to evidenced approaches to depression. In 2020, I developed a complete, online, professional certificate in preparing health workers to practice an evidence-based psychological treatment for depression. The program was launched in 2021, and to date, 100 health workers have completed the program in Australia, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. In 2023, an alternative offering of the program was made available through micro credentialing. In the United Kingdom, I was part of a team which completed a program of research which developed and tested a novel intervention to improve the physical health of people with Schizophrenia. The Health Improvement Profile (HIP) for people with Schizophrenia.

Key outputs from this program of research have been:

1.      Enhanced physical health management in people with SMI internationally e.g. The Lancet Psych Commission blueprint for protecting physical health in mental illness recommends physical health monitoring in SMI. The NICE psychosis guidance [CG178] advises annual monitoring of physical health.

2.      In 2017 HMC, which runs 95% of health services in Qatar, incorporated the HIP as a standard of care.

3.      Five primary care services in England adopted and applied the HIP to 400 patients on their SMI register.

4.      In Victoria (Australia) two mental health services (Alfred Health and Northern Health) use the HIP and have completed health checks with approximately 250 people with SMI.

Jointly with a team of academics in Melbourne, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, we have conducted a program of research aimed at improving the integrity of research conducted by nurses. 

Qualifications

• Doctorate in Nursing University of Essex

• Master of Science in Mental Health Interventions Middlesex University London