Emma Schofield

Background

About Emma Schofield

I am helping, where I can, to develop high quality research in Port Macquarie and other similar regional towns in Australia. UNSW Medical Students in the Rural Clinical School doing their 4th year research project can play an important role. I would like to hear from anyone who is interested in medical research on the mid-north coast and/or interested in supervising a medical student for 1 year. On a broader scale, I believe in building positive cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaborations that last into the future, generating new and better research questions as they go. Where good researchers are working together, good research will eventuate. However it often needs facilitation to connect people and I hope to help with this in my role as research coordinator for the medical students in Port Macquarie. My particular interest is in neurodegeneration - dementia and Parkinson's disease being the most prevalent. The Port Macquarie/Hastings area has the third highest population of people with dementia in NSW. The Royal Commission into dementia, in particular, has highlighted that we have a large, very vulnerable population of people in Australia who currently underserved. Some have a staggeringly poor quality of life and many of us will end up in the same situation in years to come if the problem is not addressed. My investigations so far indicate that healthcare delivery innovation and research translation that can link good technology, nurse specialists and primary care, is particularly important to address the high incidence of neurodegeneration in regions like the Mid-North Coast. In terms of technology, we desperately need efficient and useful medical database software that is conducive to collecting and extracting clean data in real time. It needs to be affordable, as currently the cost of software is exorbitant and obstructive to good healthcare research. Efficient data collection across the country, in all medical fields, will be necessary in order to develop deep learning systems for improved and consistent diagnosis, especially in poorly served populations. I would particularly like to hear from anyone who would be interested in working on this as a pilot research project.