Macquarie University’s AIHI congratulates Dr Klay Lamprell on PhD

Macquarie University’s AIHI is pleased to congratulate Dr Klay Lamprell on the awarding of her PhD - Meta-narratives in the melanoma patient journey: A medical humanities approach to understanding patients’ experiences.

A shared commitment to improve outcomes for patients drove author and journalist Dr Klay Lamprell and Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, founding director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, and was the impetus for Dr Lamprell to develop a narrative framework for comprehending patient’s experiences.

Professor Braithwaite said Dr Lamprell’s work would prove valuable to future qualitative healthcare research and contribute to AIHI’s focus on improving outcomes for patients which, after decades of improvement to the health system, remain highly variable.

Dr Lamprell said “In the course of my research at AIHI I became fascinated by patients’ accounts of critical illness and the stories of their medical trajectories. Patient stories, unlike the data collected in questionnaires and medical records, tell a deeply personal account of the journey through diagnosis, treatment and recovery. And yet, there was no method to incorporate these stories into the healthcare mix.”

Dr Lamprell’s research focussed on the healthcare journeys of people with melanoma and was conducted at a medical oncology clinic in Prince of Wales Hospital Sydney; and included a meta-narrative analysis of 214 personal accounts of melanoma published on websites in Australian, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom.

“The stories I encountered were compelling. They told of poor choices made in response to symptoms, complex pathways to diagnosis, problematic consequences of surgical and chemical treatments, unfilled needs for inter-disciplinary support in follow-up care, and a desperate desire for greater chances of surviving what is an aggressive, recurrent disease,” said Dr Lamprell.

Dr Lamprell’s PhD establishes a medical humanities approach to investigating patient experience that identifies key phases of transformation in the short and long-term medical, informational, psychological and practical needs of people with melanoma.

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