Talking Point: AOD-Stats: The Re-development and Re-launch of a community tool to map alcohol and drug harms across Victoria, presented by Jessica Killian, Sam Campbell, Adam Scott and Rowan Ogeil on the 15th of December 2021

Overview

AOD-stats has undergone a significant revamp over the past 2 years, and was relaunched in November 2021, by DHHS (Victoria). The site provides information on harms related to alcohol, illicit and pharmaceutical drug use in Victoria. The website provides a convenient resource for policy planners, drug service providers, health professionals and other key stakeholders.
This presentation will cover the background to the re-development; provide details on stakeholder engagement in the website redevelopment; and demonstrate features available to users of the site.

About the presenter

Jessica Killian: is a research fellow in the National Addiction and Mental Health Surveillance Unit (NAMHSU) at Turning Point and an adjunct research fellow at Monash University. Jessica joined Turning Point in 2011 and was instrumental in the redevelopment of the Alcohol Statistics Series and Drugs Stats Handbooks into Victoria’s alcohol and drug online interactive mapping website – namely AODstats since 2014.

Sam Campbell: is the Data Science Lead of the National Addiction and Mental Health Surveillance Unit, and Senior Data Scientist at Monash University, and Google AI Impact Challenge grantee. At Turning Point, Sam leads a team that develops and maintains infrastructure for the annotation of ambulance clinical records, trains and deploys machine learning models to automate the same, and identifies and implements strategies to enrich and leverage NAMHSU's proprietary data.

Adam Scott: has worked at Turning Point as a Research Assistant since 2014. He holds a PhD in Business Sustainability and a Master’s degree in Psychology. He also teaches at Swinburne Online, and is an Editor and Researcher at the Analysis and Policy Observatory (APO).

Rowan Ogeil: is the Deputy Strategic Lead, National Addiction and Mental Health Surveillance Unit at Turning Point, and a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. Rowan was awarded his PhD in Psychology from Monash University in 2012, and his research examining addiction and sleep issues has employed translational methods across genetic, behavioural, and population levels. He has authored >75 publications (collectively cited >900 times), and his research has received funding from diverse sources including the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), where he previously held a Peter Doherty Fellowship, the Australian Research Council (ARC), and the Commonwealth Department of Health.