Glocal health Consultants

"Glocal support on glocal issues –
health policy and implementation thought leadership"

Bio

After an uneventful foray into garden and landscape architecture, Evelyne found her passion in health, and more in particular at the interface between policy, politics, and health promotion. She was fortunate enough to be a guinea pig in the new Health Sciences start-up at (what is now) Maastricht University, in The Netherlands. In what still was a tiny university in the late 1970s and early 1980s, radical principles of problem-based and community-based learning were developed and evidenced. In her budding research she worked with the European Office of WHO, and discovered the exciting world of global public health. After completing her Master of Health Science she attended the University of California at Berkeley for a Master of Public Health. Upon her return to The Netherlands she completed a PhD on the feasibility of true policies for health at the national level. Discovering that these were more easily attained at the local level she worked again with WHO in its emergent Healthy City programme.

With Maastricht University she developed the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research on Healthy Cities for which she was Director between 1992 and 2001. For the Centre she did research work with local governments and community groups, and advised WHO on Healthy City evaluation matters. Simultaneously, she drove the establishment of postgraduate Master of Public Health training in Maastricht, which led her to be elected (twice, 1992-1995 and 1995-1998) as Secretary-General of the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, ASPHER. Her expertise contributed to the establishment of Healthy Cities around the world, and Schools of Public Health in Kazakhstan, El Salvador en Denmark. There, at the University of Southern Denmark, she was the foundation professor of public health for the new teaching, learning and research programmes in public health and health promotion (2000-2005).

Evelyne moved to Victoria, Australia in January, 2005. She continues her Healthy Cities and health promotion work with a particular focus on health political science. Between 2007 and 2014 she was asked to develop and implement a public health and health promotion teaching and learning programme in the Medical School of Deakin University. The programme she developed embraces cloud learning in what is called Reflective Asynchronous Learning Teachnologies in Medical Education (ReALTiME).

In August 2014 it was time to say farewell to medical education and regroup to her passion of health political science research and teaching, this time at La Trobe University. This move coincided with the publication of the OUP book Health Promotion and the Policy Process, a launchpad for renewed substantive investment in health, policy, and politics.

Evelyne’s passion for equity, and the opportunity to truly work at the interface between health policy, research and practice emerged with her taking up the position of Director at the Centre for Health Equity, Training, Research and Evaluation (CHETRE) at the University of New South WalesSouth Western Sydney Local Health District, and the Ingham Institute. These interactions led to even greater productivity, for instance, as editor of the Palgrave Series of Public Health Policy Research (with Patrick Fafard) and a keystone work on Healthy Cities (with Jean Simos).