Billie Giles-Corti, PhD

Conversations on Urban Health - Dr Yonette Thomas

Professor Giles-Corti is a public health academic and has been working in the built environment and health space for two decades. Most of her research is with sectors outside of health – urban planners, landscape architects, etc. She is really pleased to see that the health sector is getting into the built environment and health area. Her work has been focused on creating evidence for thinkers and actors outside of health to influence policy and practice. She describes her efforts as a very interesting journey. The evidence-base has been important for sustaining multi-sector partnerships. When Professor Giles-Corti refers to the health sector, she is focused on the use of the health budgets less on the health care system and more on health promotion, disease prevention, and the environment. She feels that the health sector’s role in asking the other sectors to create conditions for doing health has been late coming. That is partly because we haven’t had the quantitative evidence. It has taken a long time to get the evidence. There has been a lot of sophisticated conversations going on over the last year and when we need to change cities we need to use natural experiments. That is increasingly valued. We are creating this wonderful multidisciplinary database on interventions and associations in focusing on the role of cities in diseases in general. Professor Giles-Corti sees ISUH playing a major role in getting researchers to think differently about how we do research. If you want to change cities and influence health, you really have to influence the policy environment. She sees the ISUH conferences as opportunities for engaging policy makers and practitioners with researchers in innovative ways for generating policy-relevant research. Such research should be co-designed and resonate with the people you are trying to influence. This can be very exciting applied scientific work – applying innovative techniques focused on a particular problem that a city is trying to solve. ISUH can be a space for discussing how to do research that makes a difference and influences policy makers.