84 | Professor Marie Bismark on health law, public health & psychiatry

Doctor NOS

Professor Marie Bismark is a medical practitioner, health law academic, company director, and mother- of-three. She heads the Law and Public Health Unit at the University of Melbourne where her research explores the intersection between health practitioner wellbeing and patient safety. Her research has been published in leading peer review journals and has influenced regulatory policy in Australia and internationally.

In addition to her academic role, Prof Bismark works as a psychiatry registrar at the Kapiti Mental Health Clinic. She serves as a board member of The Royal Women’s Hospital, GMHBA health insurance, and Summerset retirement villages.

Prof Bismark has previously completed a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard University and is the recipient of an NHMRC Investigator Grant. In 2019, Prof Bismark was named as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. She is the first author of a recently published book "Experiences of Health Workers in the COVID-19 pandemic: In their own words".
In this episode, we discuss her intersecting journeys in law and medicine, venturing into both public health training and psychiatry training, and her experiences on multiple governance boards and leadership roles, including ACC and the Health and Disability Commission (HDC). We discuss her aforementioned published book, and her next steps looking into the future.

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Chapter

1. Marie Bismark (00:00:00)

2. Finding medicine and law (00:01:28)

3. working with HDC (00:03:17)

4. Balancing medicine and law studies (00:05:12)

5. Practicing law & public health training in a detour (00:08:22)

6. Finding public health (00:09:18)

7. Harkness fellowship (00:10:09)

8. Governance roles (00:13:42)

9. Returning to psychiatry (00:20:29)

10. Return to work programmes (00:22:34)

11. Moving between Australia to NZ (00:25:13)

12. Returning to psychiatry and day-to-day (00:28:28)

13. Part time training in psychiatry (00:31:18)

14. Examinations involved in psychiatry (00:32:53)

15. Pandemic effect on healthcare workers (00:34:41)

16. What's next? (00:42:58)

17. Work-life balance (00:45:58)