Jeffrey Braithwaite

Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite is Founding Director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Director of the Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science and Professor of Health Systems Research at Macquarie University.

Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite is a leading health services and systems researcher with an international reputation for his work investigating and contributing to systems improvement. He has particular expertise in the culture and structure of acute settings, leadership, management and change in health sector organisations, quality and safety in healthcare, accreditation and surveying processes in the international context and the restructuring of health services. Professor Braithwaite is well known for bringing management and leadership concepts and evidence into the clinical arena and he has published extensively, with over 470 refereed contributions (including 13 edited books, 75 book chapters, 357 articles and 59 refereed conference papers; and 285 peer-reviewed abstracts and posters; and 206 other publications, e.g., international research reports) He has presented at or chaired international and national conferences, workshops, symposia and meetings on more than 914 occasions, including 97 keynote addresses. He is the recipient of 46 awards, including the prestigious Health Services Research Award by Research Australia in 2015 and multiple Editor’s Choice awards for papers published in International Journal for Quality in Health Care.

Theories and ideas Professor Braithwaite has helped shape, formulate or devise, and provided research findings for, are now in common use as a result of his work: multi-method, triangulated approaches to research, the boundary-less hospital, accreditation models in general practice and beyond, clinician-managers as key players in reform initiatives, fundamental principles for the governance of health systems, diversity in clinical professional groups, inter-professional learning and culture change rather than restructuring as a more sustainable strategy for reform. His empirical results have exposed the distinctive attitudes of clinical professional groups, how clinician-managers enact their leadership responsibilities, the relationships between efficiencies and structural type of teaching hospitals, the behavioural displays of clinicians in service structures and the status of system-wide patient safety improvement initiatives.

As at 2019, Professor Braithwaite has received career research funding of over $131 million spread over 82 grants; total new research funding and grants in the last five years amounts to over $83 million; more than $75.2 million of this funding is Category 1, peer-reviewed, chiefly ARC and NHMRC funding. He referees for 31 journals and the health research bodies of Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom as well as for many international conferences and symposia. He publishes in the leading journals in three convergent fields and thus expresses his work at a unique intersection of organisational studies, health services research and clinical care. Journals he contributes to include Journal of the American Medical Association, BMC Medicine, the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, PLoS Medicine, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Health Services Management Research, BMJ Quality and Safety, International Journal for Quality in Health Care, Social Science & Medicine, BMC Health Services Research, International Journal of Health Planning and Management and Journal of Health, Organisation and Management.