Primary health specialist to head Massey college

Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Primary health specialist to head Massey college

One of Australia's foremost primary health care academics, Professor Jane Mills, has been appointed to head Massey University's College of Health.

Professor Mills is currently Professor of Clinical Sciences (Nursing) and the nursing discipline leader in the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, College of Science, Engineering and Health, at RMIT University in Melbourne.

She will be the second head of the College of Health since its creation in 2013 and replaces Professor Paul McDonald. The college has staff and students on all three Massey campuses, Auckland, Manawatū and Wellington.

University Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey announced the appointment today, saying Professor Mills' outstanding strength as a researcher and an academic leader complements her wide-ranging experience as a healthcare manager, teacher and mentor.

"When we established the College of Health the vision was for an academic collective that, through research and teaching, transformed the way New Zealand addresses health and wellbeing issues as well as responding to big global health challenges. In three years it has made extraordinary progress towards that bold vision and now requires a leader who is passionate about achieving the goals we set and pushing new boundaries of what is possible."

Professor Mills qualified and worked as a nurse in Tasmania and held a variety of clinical, management and academic roles in Queensland, Victoria and Britain. She has a General Nursing Certificate from the Royal Hobart Hospital, a Bachelor of Nursing and Master of Nursing from the University of Tasmania, a Graduate Certificate of Education (Tertiary Teaching) from James Cook University, a Master of Education (Distinction) from Charles Sturt University and a Doctor of Philosophy from Monash University. Her PhD thesis was on rural nurses' experiences of mentoring.

She has worked at Monash as a senior research fellow, at James Cook University as a senior lecturer and deputy head of the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Nutrition, associate professor and associate dean research in the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Molecular Sciences, professor promotional chair and deputy dean of the Graduate Research School and director of the Centre for Nursing and Midwifery Research.

An internationally recognised, grounded theorist, she has been author or co-author of 114 published journal articles and five books, as well as being the recipient, solely or jointly, of more than $A1.7 million in research and consultancy income.

Professor Mills says, “with the recent release of the New Zealand Health Strategy it has never been a more exciting time for universities with a strong track record in public health and primary healthcare. Massey’s College of Health has a unique and powerful mix of schools, clinics, research centres and the Massey Institute of Food Science and Technology that positions us at the forefront of ensuring the health and wellbeing of individuals, whānau and society more broadly. I am honoured by this appointment and look forward to leading the College of Health into the future.”

Professor Mills joins Massey on January 16.

About the College of Health:
• Formed 2013
• Students: 3000+
• Staff: 300+
• Schools: Food and Nutrition, Nursing, Public Health, Social Work, Sport and Exercise

About Massey University
• Massey University was founded as an agricultural college in Palmerston North in 1927.
• A University since 1964, it has had campuses in Auckland (at Albany) since 1993 and Wellington since 1999.
• It has five colleges – Business, Creative Arts, Health, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Sciences.
• It is Australasia's leading university provider of distance education, with 14,000 of the 32,000 students it enrolled last year studying by distance.
• There were 4400 international students enrolled in 2015.
• It has just over 3100 full-time equivalent staff, 1100 of them academicsTotal operating revenue of $450 million a year and assets valued in excess of $1 billion.

For more information about Massey University

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