Dr. Coralie Wales

We need high quality, safe, integrated and connected health and social services for consumers and communities. What delivers is organisations and communities coming together to understand community-identified priorities about the health and social care services for local communities. The magic happens when providers partner with communities to design the services they identify as useful. Co-design methodologies, community juries, discovery workshops revealing common goals & principles and rigorous evaluation approaches are helpful. Applying the ingredients for successful partnerships is crucial. With several consumers-as-researchers, we undertook a three-year investigation of the experiences of consumers involved in strategic alliances with public health clinicians in service improvement activities. This provided an understanding of the practice of partnership from the consumer point-of-view. This work was published in 2021. My current research aims to understand the health and social care investment priorities of people as represented in community juries in Western Sydney. I graduated with a PhD in Community Health from the University of Sydney in 2011 and became an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University in 2022. In 2023 I was awarded an OAM for services to Community Health and currently work with the Western Sydney Primary Health Network.