Dr Leanne Coombe

Honorary Associate Professor

School of Public Health
Faculty of Medicine

Overview

Leanne is an academic specialising in Indigenous public health. She has a strong background as a health practitioner, executive manager in both the Australian Government and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services, and as an international public health consultant. She has extensive experience teaching using a strengths-based approach as opposed to the deficit model, and supports other staff to utilise culturally-safe teaching practices across health professional education programs at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level. She was a co-lead on the Game Changing Education - Embedding Indigenous knowledges in the training and development of the health workforce in a culturally safe transformative learning environment project, funded through both teaching fellowship and teaching innovation grants, which have been implemented in both the HaBS and Medicine faculties. Leanne brings this knowledge and experience to her role as Co-Chair of the World Federation of Public Health Associations' Public Health Professionals' Education and Training Working Group, which has published the results of a curriculum mapping project benchmarked against the Global Charter for the Public’s Health. She is also on the editorial team for the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Public Health. Leanne and the Indigenous Health Education and Workforce Development team from UQ and the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health were awarded two prestigious and highly competitive awards: the Business & Higher Education Roundtable Award for Outstanding Collaboration in Higher Education and Training, and the Australian Awards for University Teaching Award for Programs that Enhance Learning.

Research Interests

  • Indigenous Public Health
  • Public Health Competencies
  • Curriculum Design and Pedagogy
  • Cross-cultural Teaching Practices

Research Impacts

The outcomes of the research I have undertaken with the PHILE Network have led to improvements in Indigenous public health education and contributed to the scholarship of teaching and learning more generally. Specifically, I am one of the lead authors on the second edition of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Public Health Core Competency Standards Framework for MPH programs in Australia.

Qualifications

  • Doctoral Diploma of Public Health, Flinders University
  • Masters (Coursework) of Public Health, The University of Queensland

Publications

View all Publications

Publications

Featured Publications

Journal Article

Conference Publication

  • Weeramanthri, Tarun, Tahzib, Farhang, Thomas, James, Czabanowska, Kasia, Coombe, Leanne and Robinson, Priscilla (2023). Public health ethics in the education and training of our public health workforce. 17th World Congress on Public Health, Rome, Italy, 2-6 May 2023. Heraklion, Greece: European Publishing. doi: 10.18332/POPMED/164347

  • Coombe, Leanne, Huang, Jasmine, Khosravi, Hassan, Russell, Stuart and Sheppard, Karen (2018). Understanding (SaP) Partnerships: evaluating what works!. Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA 2018), Adelaide, SA, Australia, 2-5 July 2018.

Other Outputs