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Lecturer: Tony Blakely  (Professor, University of Melbourne) /profile

Professor Tony Blakely is an epidemiologist and public health medicine specialist. He is committed to answering questions about which public health interventions will achieve the greatest improvements in health and social outcomes, reduce inequalities in health, and do so cost-effectively. His research covers a range of topic areas, and combines methods from multiple disciplines: biostatistics, economics, econometrics, and computer and data science.

Tony is Director of the Population Interventions (PI) Unit within the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. As part of the PI Unit, Tony is leading the Scalable Health Intervention Evaluation program - SHINE - which is a data science and simulation platform to rapidly estimate health, health inequality, cost and productivity impacts of virtually any preventive intervention, in any country.

During 2023 to 2024, Tony is also Chair of the NZ Royal Commission on COVID-19 Lessons Learned.

Summary: COVID-19 has taught us that what we do in the health sector impacts all of society. 

Populations are aging, meaning what we do in prevention should increasingly consider how we can use prevention programs to not only increase longevity and reduce health inequalities, but also contribute to 'social sustainability' through healthier working age populations.

This presentation will summarize the Scalable Health Intervention Evaluation program (SHINE) as one way to estimate future impacts of prevention on multiple health and social outcomes.  SHINE builds on the burden of disease methodology to simulate populations into the future under 'business-as-usual'  and alternative intervention scenarios.  Tobacco, sodium, COVID-19 and housing interventions will be presented - and the outline for a league table that compares 1000s of interventions for decision makers.