Leanne Coombe

Leanne is an academic specialising in Indigenous public health. She has a strong background as a health practitioner, executive manager in both the Australian Government and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services, and as an international public health consultant. She has extensive experience teaching using a strengths-based approach as opposed to the deficit model, and supports other staff to utilise culturally-safe teaching practices across health professional education programs at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level. She was a co-lead on the Game Changing Education - Embedding Indigenous knowledges in the training and development of the health workforce in a culturally safe transformative learning environment project, funded through both teaching fellowship and teaching innovation grants, which have been implemented in both the HaBS and Medicine faculties. Leanne and the Indigenous Health Education and Workforce Development team from UQ and the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health were awarded two prestigious and highly competitive awards: the Business & Higher Education Roundtable Award for Outstanding Collaboration in Higher Education and Training, and the Australian Awards for University Teaching Award for Programs that Enhance Learning. Leanne brings this knowledge and experience to her role as Co-Chair of the World Federation of Public Health Associations' Public Health Professionals' Education and Training Working Group, which has published the results of a curriculum mapping project benchmarked against the Global Charter for the Public’s Health. She is also a member of the Steering Committee and Technical Advisory Group for the World Health Organization project on national workforce capacity to implement the essential public health functions.