Director

Professor Sharon Goldfeld holds a unique position within Australian child health research, with 10 years government experience she is an expert in policy, a paediatrician, and a public health clinician scientist. Sharon is the Director of the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne and Theme Director, Population Health at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

Over her career she has successfully translated her research into service delivery and policy including the national implementation of Early Development Instrument. She now leads an innovative program focused on investigating, testing and translating sustainable policy relevant solutions that can eliminate inequities for Australia’s children.  

Experience

She leads numerous research and evaluation initiatives, including:

• right@home — A randomised controlled trial of sustained nurse home visiting that aims to find out how the universal maternal and child health nursing service might be improved to better meet the needs of families living in adverse circumstances.
• Kids in Communities Study — A national study investigating how community level factors impact children’s developmental outcomes. This study is specifically looking at the physical and social environment, socio-economic factors, access to services and governance.
• Bowel and Bladder Dysfunction service reform at RCH — An important institutional collaboration that seeks to improve the service delivered to patients and their families at RCH through more timely and streamlined care. 
• Restacking the Odds — This project seeks to use a combination of data-driven, evidence-based and expert informed approaches to develop measurable best practice indicators for quality, quantity and participation for five key early childhood strategies – antenatal support, sustained nurse home visiting, early childhood education and care, parenting programs and the early years of school.
  
• Changing Children's Chances — This project brings together leading national and international child equity researchers to map and identify potential modifiable points of policy and service intervention that can help to reduce early developmental inequities in Australian children. 
• Elucidating Pathways of Child Health Inequalities — An international collaboration established to compare inequalities across longitudinal cohorts.
  
• Building Better Readers — A randomised controlled trial that will test the value of the MiniLit reading intervention for Year 1 students with low reading ability.
• Healthier Wealthier Families: addressing child poverty through better healthcare systems.
• Getting it Right from the Start: a project that seeks to evaluate whether a specifically-designed Response to Intervention (RTI) approach for oral language and literacy instruction targeted to the early years of school can improve children’s language and literacy, when compared with usual teaching practice. 
• Changing Children’s Learning Pathways: a project exploring the perspectives and practices of leadership, teachers and staff at Victorian primary schools who have been identified as demonstrating exemplar practice in supporting students with additional health and developmental needs. 

Sharon is frequently invited to provide keynote and workshop presentations. Sharon has been invited, by the Health Minister, to assist with the formation of the National Action Plan for the Health of Children and Young People 2020 – 2030. 

Awards

• Rue Wright Award for best community child health research (awarded at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians), 2010 and 2011
• Inaugural Aileen Plant Award for contribution to Australian public health leadership and research (awarded jointly by the Public Health Association of Australia, the Australian Epidemiological Association, the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine and the Australian Health Promotion Association), 2008
• Exam Medal for best performance (Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine), 2007
• Creswick Foundation Travelling Fellowship, 2003
• Harkness International Fellowship in Health Care Policy, 1999-2000

Contact

Email: sharon.goldfeld@rch.org.au

Project Officer/Support: Jayne Ballingall (M-W) & Jackie Ding (T/F)
Email: exec.ccch@mcri.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 9345 4295