Jean Paul is a senior scientist at the Medical University of Innsbruck. In part 2 of our conversation, Jean discusses her experience leading an impact-led transcdisciplinary research project focused on supporting families with mental health issues. She highlights the challenges of stakeholder engagement, distributed team management, and transdisciplinary research. Jean emphasizes the importance of community engagement, virtual team collaboration, and fostering diversity in academia. She also reflects on the skills she brings to this role and the importance of investing in the team set up from the very beginning.
Overview
[00:29] Introducing Part 2
[02:23] Recap from Part 1
[07:27] Working with stakeholders
[13:35] Leading a distributed international interdisciplinay project team
[14:59] Learning leadership from diverse experiences
[18:25] The transferrable skills – listening and learning
[20:04] Supporting diverse career paths
[25:16] Insights for parents in academia
[29:22] Leadership, organisational design and virtual team management
Simon Martin – consultant for their organisational design in a transdisciplinary project with stakeholder involvement
Project Design principles:
The design principles that came out of the oganisational design workshops:
Effectively coordinate and involve a wide (but manageable!) network of stakeholders
Be clear on expectations, results and deliverables within the team
Keep momentum, trust and energy going across the project timeline for the core team and wider stakeholders
Make sure that the perspectives of people with lived experience are heard clearly throughout the project (capturing the voices of people impacted by perinatal mental illness and those who are treating and working with the affected person and their families)
Enact high ethical standards in our research (especially when listening to personal stories of mental illness and challenges)
Demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research partnerships with stakeholders, and challenge the landscape of traditional research and methods
Effectively lobby and influence (local and national policy makers), and raise awareness in society / politics through making our topics and results visible.
Transcripts
Geri:
Welcome to Changing Academic Life.
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I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick and this is
a podcast series where academics and
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others share their stories, provide
ideas and provoke discussions about what
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we can do individually and collectively
to change academic life for the better.
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Have you ever faced the
challenges of trying to co-design
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a project with stakeholders?
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And have a focus on both doing good
science and having an impact on
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actual practice at the same time.
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Have you ever wondered what it
takes to lead a research project?
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And more, challengingly a
distributed project team undertaking
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trans disciplinary research.
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And supporting diverse career paths.
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And do you wonder if you have the
skills and knowledge to practically
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make a distributed transdisciplinary
project team work well?
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If you said yes to any of these
questions or curious about them, I
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think you'll find lots of value in this
ongoing conversation with Jean Paul.
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Jean is a senior scientist at the medical
university of Innsbruck in Austria.
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In part two of our conversation
here, she continues to reflect
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on their very deliberate design
of both stakeholder engagement.
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And bringing the same values into
their organizational structure.
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Which is reflected in how they built
their team, built their relationships,
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manage meetings and lots more.
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Also loved in this conversation, how
Jean reflected on, how she developed
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the mindset and skills to bring to
this leadership role, even though
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she's a relatively young researcher.
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If you recently listened to part one,
You might just want to skip ahead now
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to about seven minutes into the episode.
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If you need a little bit of a recap,
both to who Jean is her background
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and to the project context.
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I'll let Jean introduce herself
again, just as a recap of
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where we got to in part one.
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Jean, do you want
to introduce yourself?
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Jean: A fellow Australian, and
I moved to Austria in:
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Up until then, I was working as
a researcher at the Children's
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Hospital in Melbourne at the Murdoch
Children's Research Institute.
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And I would describe myself as
a social scientist have quite
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a mixed academic background.
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I studied arts and science
in combination at university.
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So I've always been interested in science
and how things work, but maybe also in
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combination with how people experience
health and illness and medical systems
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and so my PhD in Australia was looking
at communication between doctors who
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specialize in genetics and their patients.
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I then did a couple of postdocs in
Melbourne as a qualitative researcher,
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always working in these topics to really
understand those complex questions
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of, you know, social representation
or understanding decision making,
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understanding behavior change
understanding relationships between
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professionals or between families, across
professionals, across organizations.
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Geri: Jean then went on to talk about
applying for participation in a sandpit
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that was being held in Vienna, Austria.
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Um, and organized by the
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute.
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And so she describes the process and
also talks about the project that ended
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up being funded . And I replay this
here because it's important context
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for what we talk about in part two.
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Jean: there was a kind of core group of
us that, had this idea that children whose
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parents have a mental illness are really
missing a social network, in modern times.
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and you know, the informal support
and the low threshold neighbor
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that comes over to help out, is
something that could really make a
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difference to in these circumstances.
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And so we had this concept of the
village, which ended up getting funded.
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Geri: jean then went on to talk about
the way in which the project got set
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up, uh, based in Innsbrook in Austria
and discussing the transdisciplinary
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team they had, that was distributed
and some of the process of how they
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started recruiting participants.
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And again, just a quick recap for context.
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Jean: We gave a lot of control
to the hospitals to make decisions
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about how children could be
identified and how families might
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be recruited into the project.
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And the head of the psychiatry
department here wanted it to be the
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job of the doctors of the psychiatrists
to recruit families rather than
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the social workers or the nurses.
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Because he felt that it was the job
of psychiatrists to ask patients
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about their family and about their
general well being, not just about
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their symptoms, but understanding
their social network, understanding
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their world, so as a psychiatrist,
you can treat the patient better.
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Psychiatrists have a very short
amount of time to work with families.
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So that didn't always mean that the
conversation was very in depth and
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they may not have really understood
what the project was about.
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And if we had nurses or social workers,
they had much more time to reach more
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families, to have a higher recruitment.
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But through doing that, we were able
to have these questions about parenting
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and general well being of Children
or caring responsibilities introduced
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into the electronic medical system
of the hospital here in Innsbruck.
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And this is something that our
colleagues in Melbourne have been
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trying to get changed for over 20 years.
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Being in a small city and really
helping the community feel a sense of
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ownership of our research I think helped
make a change that hopefully is going
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to be very valuable for doctors in
thinking about who their patients are.
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When we started the doctors, some of the
psychiatrists told us that the project
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wouldn't work because their patients
didn't have children and we know that's
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Internationally, that's not true, but so
why would it be different in Innsbruck?
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And then we had some change over
time where some of the psychiatrists
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said, actually, I think this project
would be really valuable because if
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we start understanding about caring
responsibilities, maybe we can reduce
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the length of stay, inpatient stay for
these adults and help in their recovery.
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Can we also include some assessments
of recovery in the evaluation.
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Geri: So the whole approach of
being driven primarily by impact
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and it's still, it's research.
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But not just for the sake of high quality
journal publications and the careful
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thinking about who you involve and how you
involve them sounded really key to that.
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And this is where we pick up for part two.
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Where Jane continues to talk about how
they've worked with their stakeholders.
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And this leads onto a discussion
around leadership and project design,
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organizational design, and so on.
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What were some of the challenges
in working with stakeholders
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in this way in a project?
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Yeah.
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Because I think you talked before about
it's sort of about not having as much
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control in defining what goes forward.
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Jean: I think we had to start off in
a, from a very humble position, which
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especially for me not speaking German and
I was coming in to fix things in Innsbrook
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that wasn't gonna be accepted, if that's
the way I was gonna view, view the job.
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So we really had to start off by being
curious and inquisitive and listening to
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people and identifying their needs, their
concerns, their suggestions for solutions.
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And so we did that through
some network events, but also
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through qualitative interviews.
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And then we ran a series of workshops over
six months with a group of stakeholders.
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And I think what was really powerful
was in those workshops we used case
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vignettes from those interviews to
present certain situations where children
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might have been put in the pediatric
department of the hospital overnight
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because the parent was admitted and the
child didn't have anywhere else to go.
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And we then used those vignettes for the
participants to identify best practice,
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worst practice and prioritize as a group.
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What could we change together
within the scope of this project?
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What's the priority?
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Where should we target?
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Who should be doing what?
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I think some of the challenges
were that we were doing a research
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project that needed to be evaluated
and it needed to still be research.
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So some of the practitioners
might have a solution.
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And then feel that, why do you need
a research project, you just need you
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know, this group to have more money,
or we need one more team member here,
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and then that solves the problem why do
you need money to write papers and to
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do research on this and I think, yeah,
some of the challenges were the pace of
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research compared to Sometimes in Austria,
someone has an idea and they can get
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money from the local government to run
some kind of small service very quickly
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if it's, you know, if they're lucky.
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But I think that's also part of a bigger
challenge that that I've experienced in
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Austria compared to Australia, that a
lot of services are not evidence based.
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So there's a lack of health services
research and our colleague in Vienna,
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Ingrid Zeckmeister Koss is the Deputy
Director of the Austrian Health
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Technology Assessment Organization.
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And you know, the decision making behind
which treatments are valuable, and
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especially in mental health and social
services is very difficult to follow.
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And Austria is quite fragmented in its
service provision, and it, within Tirol,
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It's very fragmented because you have
the mountains and, you know, from coming
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from Australia distances are very short,
but I've grown to learn that they're
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actually a lot further away sometimes
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Geri: Because those valleys
make a big difference.
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Yeah.
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Jean: exactly and telehealth
isn't something that people
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really use or accept.
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So the services are very localized and
fragmented and can be quite short term.
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You know, something was.
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It was offered for some time, but then
it was only for one term and someone
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else, and it was lost to the system.
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So I think there were frustrations
sometimes from our stakeholders that we
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know the solution, you just have to fund
it, or you just have to do this, and
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why do we need to take so long in, in
doing all this process to have research.
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At the same time, there were also
stakeholders who had experience
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in research who maybe didn't like
how experimental it was and non
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traditional and the vagueness
sometimes in what we were doing.
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And that was sometimes also a
challenge for when we were running
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the intervention because we designed
a new role as someone who we call a
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village facilitator, who sort of helps
the parents create this network or
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strengthen this network with the child.
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And these village facilitators
had different backgrounds in
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psychology or pedagogy, social work.
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And this was a new role.
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And, you know, Austria isn't particularly
known for things happening so quickly
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and such innovations in systems.
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And that was very difficult for
professionals as well in, what
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are the expectations of my role?
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What do I do if this happens?
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And so they had.
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supervision, again, with this
relationship manager, Boltzmann,
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who had the psychology training.
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She would provide monthly supervision
with that group of practitioners
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to understand their role.
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And we also had monthly supervision
or monthly meetings with them for the
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organizational aspects, the questions
that they had that were coming up
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because we wanted to learn from them as
well, how that role worked in reality.
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And sometimes there were changes
to the role as it was going on,
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which caused challenges for the
evaluation of the project, which was
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led by a health economist in London.
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In terms of the complexity of the research
design it was quite high in designing
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something together with stakeholders,
implementing it and evaluating it
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within the space of four years.
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And then having COVID hit
in the middle of that time.
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So we had a six month extension.
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And just as we started to try and
find families to increase their
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social network, the lockdown started.
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And in, in Innsbruck, in Tyrol here,
this was, you know, the centre of some
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of the early spreads of the pandemic.
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So the hospital in Zams was one of our
study sites and they basically closed
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and were only dealing with COVID.
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And so mental health wasn't something
that they could respond to at all.
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So we had to wait, I think, six months
before we could even train the staff
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there to start recruiting families.
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Geri: So you've mentioned team
members in Vienna, in London, in
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Germany, and I see on the webpage
you've got some in Australia as
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well and all around the place.
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Can you reflect a little bit
on the experiences of being
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a PI and leading a project?
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Are you one of the few sitting
in Innsbruck and how do you
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deal with the distributed team?
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To keep every, especially in this
more open project and with the more
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transdisciplinary approach that you're
talking about, where people can't
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just get sent off into their little
silos to throw stuff over the wall.
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Jean: Yeah and we started also with
another researcher in Pakistan and another
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one in Norway who left during the project.
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So it was very international, very
interdisciplinary, and I was the
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only one then based in Innsbruck.
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We then employed a group here
team here who started six months
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after the project started.
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So for the first six months, I was
sitting here by myself in the biology
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building of the university talking in
my computer and having meetings online.
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People were very confused why I'd
moved to Austria to sit by myself.
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But I think, yeah, it's, it was a
big challenge leading such a team
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and my previous work in Melbourne,
I had been a postdoc, mostly
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working by myself, choosing my own
things, working for other people.
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The more I've been here, the more
I've realised how much I drew from
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outside in my private life and things
that I've done more generally to
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support my leadership position here.
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So I was I've always been involved in a
lot of sport and community development.
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And which the sports don't exist here.
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So I was heavily involved in netball,
which I've had to educate people on
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a little bit here and haven't had
a chance to start up a team yet.
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Probably exists in Vienna.
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But I was on the board of our
local sports club, the netball and
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football club as the only woman
and the only person under 60 or so.
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And was writing grants to to the local
council in Melbourne to get funding for
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uniforms or funding for to waive fees
for families who are more disadvantaged.
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I was very and am very passionate
about community sports or organized
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programs like that in, creating places
for people to, to have responsibility,
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to have routine, to learn about
themselves, to learn from each other.
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And yeah, I think that also working in
Australia, I did some some work as a
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youth worker in Central Australia in a
remote community where most of the town,
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the people there weren't speaking English
and They were very sceptical of people
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from outside coming in to help because in
Australia we have a very dark history of
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not being able to support our Indigenous
population and not really having the
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rest of the country, I think, not really
having good knowledge on the situation in
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remote places aboriginal Australia and a
very big difference in life expectancy,
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but when I was working in those towns
I took the approach that I was there
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to spend whatever time I had with them
to provide services to support them in
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their activities that they wanted to do.
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So having a background in in
sport and also I used to work at
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the local YMCA as a, in holiday
programs or after school care.
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So providing activities for families.
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So that meant organizing bingo
nights or taking families out to go
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hunting or going to a swimming hole.
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And fairly quickly, they accepted me
and gave me a blood group or a blood
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name, which is in Australian, Aboriginal
Australia, they have Groups of families
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that are connected not just through
blood, but also through social connections
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which means that you're, as well as
having your parents, you have a network
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of people around you who can take on
parenting responsibilities and that
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sometimes it's a good thing because, you
know, your auntie, who's not necessarily
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your auntie, blood auntie, also needs
to look after you if you don't have some
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food or if you need help with schooling.
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But it also brings a lot of expectations
and sometimes shame for the adults
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who might not be able to provide that
support when people ask, because at
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least in the communities I was working
in, I think it's a bit more universal.
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It's very shameful not to be able
to give someone what they ask for.
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And that's, I think, very different
to Western communities that if kids
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want an ice cream, you can say no.
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Yeah.
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So I think those experiences the more
I reflected on them, the more I saw
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how they provided me with insights into
working in a country that I don't speak
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the language and I don't know much
about, so I had to wait and be told.
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Geri: So how would you summarise those
in terms of the transferable skills
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?
Jean: I think the skills were really that could be transferred to here
