Kirsten McCaffery

Kirsten is a behavioural scientist and a National Health & Medical Research Council (Australia) Principal Research Fellow.

She has a national and international reputation in shared decision making, health literacy and the assessment of psychosocial outcomes, and has had four successive NHMRC fellowships. She is Director of Policy and Prevention at the School of Public Health and Director of the Sydney Health Literacy Lab, a group of 48 researchers and students, at the University of Sydney.

She is co-founder of Wiser Healthcare – a research collaboration of over 100 researchers across three Australian institutions (Universities of Sydney, Bond and Monash) and Node Leader of the Charles Perkins Centre, Health Literacy Node.

Her research focuses on psychosocial aspects of overdiagnosis and overtesting, health communication among vulnerable populations and behaviour change research. Her work uses quantitative methods such as randomised trials and experimental studies as well as qualitative research.

Professor McCaffery has received over $60 million in competitive research funding since 2000 and has over 400 publications including papers published in the highest ranked general medical journals including Lancet (3 papers), BMJ (37), JAMA (5), MJA (5).