Professor Anne Wilkinson
Professor Anne Wilkinson is the Cancer Council of Western Australia Chair in Palliative and Support Care at Edith Cowan University and a Professor in the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Postgraduate Medicine.
Prior to Professor Wilkinson joining Edith Cowan University in mid-2007, she was a Senior Health Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation, a public policy think tank in Washington, DC, USA. In addition, she was Director of the Palliative Care Policy Research Center, a clinical quality improvement, education, and palliative care health services and public policy research centre at the RAND Corporation and an Associate Professor of Research with the George Washington University Medical School, the George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA.
Professor Wilkinson has 20 years of applied health services research and public policy analysis experience in ageing, the impacts of advanced chronic illness in the elderly persons and their caregivers, and the delivery of palliative and end-of-life care. She has led numerous quality improvement initiatives in patient safety and end of life (both national and regional) involving over 400 health care providers, and has published numerous articles on her research focusing on the reform of Medicare and Medicaid to more effectively support appropriate end of life care. Dr Wilkinson has participated in a variety of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) projects, including a systematic review evaluating the evidence-base for palliative and hospice care; a systematic review of the evidence-base for cancer end-of-life outcome measures; and is a principal author of two volumes on quality improvement at the end of life: The Common Sense Guide to Improving Palliative Care and Improving Care for The End of Life, both published by Oxford University Press in 2007.
Professor Wilkinson’s current research activities include: development, and evaluation of community-based medically complex/advanced chronic illness management programs integrating palliative care into current healthcare services to provide ongoing support for patients and caregivers in the home to reduce or eliminate the need for care in an institutional setting; advance care planning, healthcare communication and medical decision-making; and the role of caregiving in advanced chronic illness and at the end-of-life.
