Invited Speaker

Joanne Bolton is a non-Indigenous health professions educator, with a background in physiotherapy. Jo is motivated by a vision of national and global health equity and considers education as an upstream way of contributing to facilitating changes in the way in which healthcare is positioned, prioritised and practiced. Her focus in on transformative curriculum design that promotes reflexivity and she actively seeks to prioritise the essential humanistic domains of healthcare required for culturally safe and collaborative person-centred healthcare delivery. Currently she works as an Interprofessional Education and Practice Development Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences (MDHS), University of Melbourne, and she is committed to a life-long learning journey of building her own cultural safety practice.

She has received $160,000 in teaching and learning innovation grants and has contributed to progressing curriculum in cultural safety practice at a Departmental, Faculty and National level. In 2020 she was the recipient of the University of Melbourne’s Award for Excellence and Innovation in Indigenous Education for her work that seeks to prioritise and support First Nations voices in healthcare education. She has also recently been highlighted in the Faculty of MDHS “Embedding the standards” series for her work of trying to be an ally.