A Melbourne-based Primary Care Physician and PhD in Public Health working on improving institutional decision-making through tabletop exercising through The Long Game Project
Expertise:
Public Health | Game Design | Tabletop Exercises | Pandemic Prevention | Forecasting | Decision Making | Behavioural Economics | Philanthropy
Career highlights:
Behavioural Insights work for Vic Gov during early COVID, PhD Excellence Scholarship, Aus Primary Care Trainee Doctor of the Year 2018, John Monash and Rhodes Scholarship runner-up. Dan has also represented Australia in two sports internationally for Australia, with a general interest in elite performance.
He is an ambassador of @Giving What We Can, a member of @High Impact Professionals, @High Impact Medicine mentor and High Impact Athletes
You will find Dan cycling, playing tabletop games or listening to podcasts when not working.
Dr Dan Epstein
This is great, do you have a table version of this?
Thanks @TJPHutton I have updated the discord link to not expire. See you in there!
I have a mixed methods public health research background on behaviour change so I’ll be done my best to measure, although it is very challenging. I’ll be writing a post soon that is much more crunchy and in the weeds about how I think about tabletop exercising as an intervention and how it impacts our approach to game design at lgp
This is a great initiative and new angle. I hope orgs see the value in your work and you get the ball rolling. I would recommend teaching out to sarah Pomeranz and the EA consulting group
This is a great idea David and could be super impactful. I especially like the organisation of regular channel consolidation. Social and internet communities I think suffer a lot from specialisation entropy and a system to reverse this is great hygiene. I would also like a ‘bounty board’s for small projects with budgets for ‘guns for hire’ RA s/PAs that would make some surge tasks move from the unfeasible to feasible catatories for orgs.
fantastic to see more edited long form with good writing! The website typography and layout also beautiful btw. Reminds of me slightly of the Economist but tbh looks and feels better. nice work!
Well I guess the character perception 2 weeks ago was closer to lawful. But now it’s a bit of a closed case😶
SBF character arc went from lawful good to chaotic evil in a timeframe that anime writers would laugh at...
+1 for Melbourne office?
As a GP myself, I would love patients like you who are evidence based and committed to treatment plans!
It is well understood depression and other mood disorders are very complex and multimodal. So trying a bunch of stuff outside medication also useful.
Also worth mentioning there is A LOT or epigenetic factors we don’t understand well and can make a big difference on effects and side effects of medications. Trial and error is usually indicated like you have done in refractory and treatment resistance experience like yours.
Well done on sharing too. Mental health is like any other chronic disease, and important to aim for ‘well managed’ rather than ‘cure’ … Because we all get down from time to time!
As a public health academic, I would love to see more carving of a niche for WELLBYs. They make a lot of sense for the bio-psycho-social model for health… as they emphasize 2⁄3 of these metrics rather than just one!
To get traction for use, they need to build awareness as a viable alternative. There should be some effort to educate academics and policymakers about the use of WELLBYs as an outcome measure of interest.
I would also like to see research on existing softer interventions that may not impact DALYs but may shift the needle considerably with WELLBYs (or not?).
Off the top of my head- some candidates might be (potential for long-term well-being increases but maybe not disability/death):
-iron fortification
-access to contraception/ pregnancy termination
-deworming (bringing another prong into debates
-living with worms is terrible), nutrition programs
-increasing sleep quality/supplying simple mattresses
-domestic violence interventions/safehouses
Another way to think of interventions for the list is taking away causes of long-term suffering that would be cheap, easy and likely permanent.
Excellent steps towards solving some tricky questions. Well done team- looking forward to seeing your reflections on this work progress.
I’m also interested in seeing better knowledge translation in this area. Particularly in the form of storytelling or narrative to make it less theoretical and provide more narrative traction.
I am a medical doctor/researcher/game designer in Australia.… just about to hand in my PhD on this (neglected) topic.
I designed and made a collectable card game for kids to incentivise and educate them on vaccine confidence, aiming to build an age-appropriate tool to support your points on educational interventions and health literacy using the engaging medium of games!
Here is the game (Vaxcards) are a few papers I published along the way:
-Tabletop Board Game Elements and Gamification Interventions for Health Behavior Change: Realist Review and Proposal of a Game Design Framework
-Recruiting for research on sensitive topics in schools: an experience with Vaxcards, a collectable vaccine card game
-Pragmatic cluster randomised control trial using Vaxcards as an age-appropriate tool to incentivise and educate school students about vaccination
-A qualitative interview study of stakeholder use of Vaxcards in schools
-Scale up of behaviour change interventions: A rapid review of international evidence and practice
-Attitudes towards vaccines and intention to vaccinate against COVID-19: a cross-sectional analysis—implications for public health communications in Australia
Thanks for taking the effort Igor, the space definitely needs good thinkers in marketing and messaging for knowledge translation and impact!