Mr Shane Hearn, Director
BApplSci (Indigenous Community Health) MPP

Shane Hearn is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney. He has more than a decade’s experience as an academic in Aboriginal Studies, Health Policy and Health Promotion with qualifications in Indigenous Community Health and a Masters in Public Policy and experience in working with Indigenous organizations and communities to promote health.

As the Director for Indigenous Health, Shane develops and teaches short courses on Indigenous health promotion to a wide variety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workers and community members. His particular teaching interests lie in Indigenous health and health promotion, public policy, health policy, and the politics of health. He also lectures on contemporary health promotion theory and practice for a variety of audiences.

His teaching is based on a Freirean approach to teaching and learning, and uses a combination of methods and styles to engage students, modelling the self-determination that is critical to Indigenous health development.

Shane has also played a leadership role in international initiatives in Indigenous health promotion, chairing the Indigenous Organising Committee for the XVIIIth World Conference on Health Promotion and Education in Melbourne in 2004. And within Australia he has presented a keynote on Indigenous health promotion at the national conference of the Public Health Association of Australia, and at the national conference on health promotion held by the New Zealand Health Promotion Forum. He has organised policy forums on Indigenous health promotion at three Australian Health Promotion Association national conferences, and is a keynote presenter at the first Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Promotion Conference to be held in Perth in November 2005.

Shane received the Rowan Nicks Drysdale Fellowship in 2003 to study the extent to which National Health and Medical Research Council funded research on Indigenous health had influenced subsequent health policy. His research interests also include identifying the factors that universities and schools offer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island young people educational opportunities that respect their cultural knowledge and experiences, that meet their needs for relevant curricula and teaching/learning styles, and that support them appropriately.

His current research is developing measures of resilience of Indigenous young people and assessing the relationship between the young people’s resilience, their educational outcomes and health status.

Shane is a member of the NHMRC’s Indigenous Health Research review panel, reviewing research proposals for Indigenous Health Research funding.

As well, Shane has been a member of consultancy teams evaluating two major medical outreach programs in Far North Queensland, investigating the health and social support needs of Indigenous families in South Western Sydney, and evaluating the National Indigenous Pneumococcal and Influenza Immunisation Program.