Helen Mitchell Australian Diabetes Society and the Australian Diabetes Educators Association Annual Scientific Meeting 2017

Helen Mitchell

Twenty Five years experience in Nursing, Public Health, Health Promotion and health service leadership and delivery. During her career Helen has held roles as a lecturer, researcher, intervention designer, evaluator, public health advocate and consultant. During her career Helen has combined her passion for working with people and substantial health sector experience to improve health outcomes for individual’s and health systems. Her work has taken her around the state, across the country and the world working on research, projects, partnerships and engaging stakeholders in the public and primary care sector. Essentially Helen manages change effectively at many different levels. In her role as Director of DESMOND Australia, Helen was critical to getting this type 2 Diabetes self-management program adopted in Australia. DESMOND is the first type 2 diabetes self-management program to meet the NDSS standards and be offered consistently across Australia as part of the NDSS. As part of its roll out in Australia Helen developed a business model putting the focus on the patient and provides program fidelity and is a health system delivery already contributing to savings in health care. DESMOND’s success continues to grow as the program is now being run across Australia and in New Zealand. In addition the work is underway with Aboriginal People in WA to create a culturally appropriate adaption of DESMOND to see a version of the program run in community, by community members. Helen is a Chief Investigator on an NH&MRC partnership grant to ensure that the program is culturally acceptable and appropriate.