Last month Dietitians Australia announced the newly appointed Fellows of Dietitians Australia

These leaders have shown outstanding dedication to advancing the profession and improving health outcomes.

 

Amongst these leaders was our own Director and Principal Dietitian, Associate Professor Shelley Wilkinson.

Shelley is an Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian and also has a PhD in Psychology. She has been a dietitian for 30 years.

Her research aims to improve mothers’ and babies’ health, during and after pregnancy, by advancing nutrition care and capabilities of services and clinicians. Her work focuses on women at high risk of poor outcomes, especially those with gestational diabetes and at risk of excessive gestational weight gain.

Key approaches in her research portfolio have involved evaluating methods to translate nutrition best practice into clinical care. Applying learnings from her NHMRC TRIP (translating research into practice) fellowship she has collaborated with numerous Queensland Health Services to facilitate adoption of new models of care, improving patients’ and staff’s satisfaction, clinical measures, as well as increasing understanding of how to co-create these meaningful changes with clinical teams.

 

As well as her role here at Lifestyle Maternity, she is as a Project Officer at the Mater Mothers in Brisbane where her work supports an evidence-informed, co-creation approach to the delivery of care within Obstetric Medicine.

Her recent projects have:

• radically redesigned currently evaluating the GDM care;
• evaluated the normalising of pregnancy care for women at high medical risk (the “OMGP” model); and
• is currently evaluating the 4HER post-pregnancy cardio-metabolic health clinic.