Dr Kathryn Browne-Yung’s paper “Developing a screening tool to recognise social determinants of health in Australian clinical settings” co-authored with Dr Toby Freeman, Professor Malcolm Battersby, Emeritus Professor Doug McEvoy and Professor Fran Baum, recently received a high commendation in the 2020 Public Health Research & Practice Excellence Awards.
We were very happy to receive this news but saddened that it was received after her death in March this year. The winning paper concerned the development of a social history screening tool for diverse clinical settings to alert health professionals to specific social factors that may affect patients’ treatment and recovery. The paper was one of Kathryn’s last.
Kathryn was a much-loved member of staff – a highly respected scholar with a particular gift for theory and a passion for challenging inequity, and a funny, kind, generous and thoughtful colleague and friend. She joined the Southgate Institute for Health, Society, and Equity as a PhD scholar with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Australian Health Inequities Program, graduating in 2011 and winning the Public Health association (SA) Kerry Kirke Student award that year.
Over some of this time Kathryn also worked as a project manager on the Flinders University based Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing. In more recent years Kathryn was a Research Fellow with the Southgate’s NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in the Social Determinants of Health Equity, working specifically on the health equity impacts of the closure of Holden’s automotive plant in South Australia, and led work on the development of a social history screening tool, that formed the basis of the commended paper. She was also the Southgate Institute’s Higher Degrees coordinator, working creatively to support our PhD students. She recently began working with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Program as well as the Rehabilitation, Aged and Extended Care group within the College of Medicine and Public Health, and had been awarded a Flinders Foundation grant to lead research on the risk of homelessness for older women.
Kathryn has been greatly missed by her friends, colleagues and the wider academic community. Her husband Michael and sons Ronan and Conor have remained in our thoughts and we are glad they have received this recognition of Kathryn’s excellent work.