David Peiris

David is Director of the Global Primary Health Care Program (Better Care) and Co-Director of the Centre for Health Systems Science. He is a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney and works clinically as a GP in Sydney.

David joined the Institute in 2006 and leads the Better care program at the Institute. This program focusses on SDG 3 - especially SDGs 3.4 and 3.8. The goal is to overcome the challenges of delivering affordable, high-quality health services and programs to communities across the globe. It is underpinned by health systems science, a dynamic and emerging discipline that includes health services research, health policy and systems research and implementation science.

David has published extensively in areas related to health systems research and leads several grants testing innovative strategies to improve access to high-quality primary health care with a particular focus on under-served populations. He is a 2018-2021 NHMRC Career Development Fellow and Heart Foundation Future Fellow. He was the 2015-2016 Australian Harkness Fellow in Healthcare policy, based at Harvard School of Public Health where he conducted a national study of the changes to health care delivery systems associated with President Obama's reforms.

He has been a board member with the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners National Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and sits on several government, non-government and research advisory committees. He was the elected co-chair of the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases committee for hypertension control from 2012 to 2015.