Dr Alex Manson: A Dietitian’s Career in Research
Episode Overview
I speak with an allied health professional who chose a career in research over clinical practice.
You’ll hear about her field of interest, what a career in research looks like, collaborations, mentors, and how her research is opening doors for allied health professionals and improving children’s health across Australia.
Dr Alex Manson
Key topics
- Dr. Alex Manson's career path from dietetics to research
- The impact of school-provided meals on child health
- Community involvement in school nutrition programs
- The benefits of nutritious school meals beyond dietetics
- Australian policies on school food and international comparisons
- Challenges and opportunities in implementing school meal programs
- Research methods in public health nutrition
- The role of community and local sourcing in school food
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dr. Alex Manson and her background
02:06 Deciding on dietetics and exploring career pathways
04:27 Honours research on children's school food intake
07:42 Research findings on children's nutrition and public health impact
08:34 The importance of early intervention and school settings
10:02 Support systems and mentorship in research
11:25 Australian school food policies compared internationally
12:49 Benefits of school meals for development and environment
13:46 Current programs like Kickstart for Kids and their role
14:42 Considerations in creating school meal programs
16:06 A universal but tailored approach to school meals
17:31 Parental interest and preferences for school meals
22:42 Food literacy and integrating nutrition education
24:07 A typical week in Dr. Manson’s research and advocacy work
25:33 Surprising aspects of research and career insights
26:29 Challenges in research funding and career sustainability
27:53 Advocacy and growth in the school food sector
30:45 Next steps for expanding school meal programs
33:35 Feedback mechanisms and community engagement in research
34:30 Closing remarks and future outlook for school nutrition in Australia
Disclaimer
This podcast is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the hosts and guests, and does not constitute professional advice. We make no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or applicability of the content. You should consult your professional advisers for specific advice relating to your situation.
Transcript
Wallace Long
Hi, I'm Wallace Long, welcome to Health Practice Insights, the podcast for Allied Health Practitioners who are looking to grow their practice.
Now, on this podcast, we usually hear from Allied Health Practitioners as they open, manage, and grow their practices, as well as business consultants who share insights on topics like increasing profitability and becoming an employer of choice.
In this episode though, we’re take a slightly different track, as I speak with an allied health professional who chose a career in research over clinical practice.
You'll hear about her field of interest, what a career in research looks like, collaborations, mentors, and how her research is opening doors for allied health professionals and improving children's health across Australia.
Dr Alex Manson joins me next.
Alex Manson, welcome to the Health Practice Insights Podcast.
Alex Manson
Thanks for having me, Wallace. It's great to be here.
Wallace Long
It's wonderful to catch up with you and hear about your progression through your career. To start off, I'm really interested to understand where your interest in health began.
Alex Manson
I guess it began in school. My mum works as a home economics teacher. So food has always been very much part of our family and household, and that's also gone back generations.
So we very much sat around the table at home and would discuss food, discuss the impact of food, where it came from, and really had this strong connection to what food meant. So then, as I progressed through my education, I was interested in nutrition, interested in cooking, and that led me to enroll in nutrition and dietetics once I had commenced year 12. And excitingly, then really grew my love for health and health promotion and really passionate about the impact that food can have and how major of a consideration food and dietary intake can be in all aspects of life.
Wallace Long
When you were looking into the health sector, was it just obviously going to be dietetics and nutrition?
Alex Manson
No, I did think about different options. I had looked into occupational therapy or speech pathology, but then it came down to it and I thought dietetics was the area for me.
I was really passionate about food in particular and the potential career opportunities that dietetics could open me up to so what were they?
Wallace Long
What were the types of pathways you were seeing?
Alex Manson
Interestingly, one of the most well-known pathways of dietetics for me when I was first looking at enrolling was private practice. And I was quite interested in sitting and working with people individually on their health concerns.
But as I learnt a bit more about dietetics, I realised that the scope was much larger than the one on one work. And that's what really interested me, that it had several different pathways and many career opportunities. And it was almost my way of going back against when people said, there's no work in nutrition and dietetics. I said, well, there's many options of different ways that you can work in this space. You just have to find the right one and you'll find a job.
Wallace Long
So you undertook a Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics at Flinders University?
Alex Manson
Yes, I did.
Wallace Long
And you commenced, what, nine years ago?
Alex Manson
Something like that.
Wallace Long
Tell me about the time there and the study you did at Flinders.
Alex Manson
I started there at Flinders and quite enjoyed it. It's quite a small cohort for nutrition and dietetics, so you became quite well known to everyone within, you know, your peers and the educators there. And really enjoyed my time there. So four year degree, a bit interrupted by COVID in the middle there with that disrupted some of the placements and the learning experiences.
But got through it and then did my honours combined within the final year of dietetics and really enjoyed that time as well.
Wallace Long
Now your honours was looking at an analysis of some nutrition and physical activity data. Can you tell me about that?
Alex Manson
My honours was a secondary analysis, meaning that this big, big data set, which is a national data set, part of kind of the ABS data, was publicly available and we decided to have a dig into what school food intake looked like within those five to twelve-year-old children in that population. And that was really, really interesting to have such a large data set to work with, so many different variables, and for a bit of a data nerd, it was very exciting. And really a great learning experience on what research was and what quantitative data analysis looked like.
So throughout that honours, you commenced a kind of literature review. Understood the data and did this data analysis and then brought it together into a publication as well. And so gave you a great snapshot of what research looked like and produced an output at the end of that that you can be really proud of.
Wallace Long
And your paper was published in the Public Health Nutrition Journal?
Alex Manson
Yes, it sure was, which was very exciting. It was great to have something come out of that honours in terms of a publication, since it is a six-month honours.
And then that's been one of my most highly cited papers. So it's something to be very proud of in the end.
Wallace Long
Was that the tipping point for you in regards to the research component as opposed to becoming a clinician?
Alex Manson
Not quite even. I think the tipping point for me was as I progressed through my dietetics degree, I really enjoyed the content and found it really interesting. But it was finding myself very much drawn more to the public health side. I didn't quite enjoy the clinical side. I've never been one to find myself feeling very comfortable in a hospital setting or enjoy working in those kind of spaces. So really enjoyed the public health opportunities. And I remember even one of my first orientation days of dietetics, there was a slide talking about all the different career opportunities and one of them was research.
And I thought, actually I hadn't thought about that, but that could be for me. And that was sat in the back of my mind and wasn't talked about too much throughout the degree until it came to the end of third year when you had to decide, do you want to do honours or not. And I thought, no, I don't know, it's a lot of extra work. Can I be bothered? And I thought, no, no, may as well, while I'm here, do it all, cram it all in and have a really productive final year.
And so I commenced my final years of placements and started with clinical placement and absolutely hated it. Just knew it wasn't going to be the setting for me from the get-go. Probably didn't come in with a great mindset either. And didn't enjoy that time as much. And COVID didn't help that placement experience much either.
That was followed by an amazing community public health placement experience where I was based in a school and working to improve the food setting in the school.
And absolutely loved that potential impact but recognised that there wasn't as many job opportunities doing exactly that role. Food service was a great placement opportunity as well. And then I started my honours. So, I already had this idea that I really wanted to work in a public health space and loved the school setting and was very fortunate that the honours project I had been allocated to worked out to be exactly looking at children's intake during school hours.
From that, that really solidified my love for research and that I could have a population kind of impact and be able to look at the ways to improve children's health across the entire country, really, and good opportunity to have reach there.
Wallace Long
I'm interested in the fact that you're in the school setting and you found that enjoyable, but the one on one clinical work not so appealing to you.
Alex Manson
The thing that drew me to working with children in their early stage of life was the fact that you could influence their health before they had chronic health conditions emerge or diagnosed. So, this would mean that you could support children in developing really healthy dietary habits. You could ensure they had access to equitable food, healthy food across the school day. And then it meant that it would prevent potential downstream chronic disease such as cardiovascular disease.
So, I really loved the opportunity to work within the school setting, prevent those conditions, rather than seeing people when they were at their worst, when they had been admitted to hospital. And dietary change wasn't a number one priority for most people who are in the hospital. They just want to get better, and diet doesn't seem like the most important thing at the time.
And you can't see the benefits right in front of you like you can with, you know, doing a stretch or recovering kind of a muscle. Whereas dietary impact is a lot kind of hidden behind the scenes and changing what you're having on a day to day basis is hard to recognise. So, children are a lot more flexible with modifying what they're consuming and recognising the impact that those things might have while they're still in that learning stage rather than when their habitual dietary patterns emerged.
Wallace Long
I'm hearing a person who loves data, who wants to have an impact on all of society. Was there anybody that tried to turn you away from research?
Alex Manson
Not really, actually. I think when I got into it, I didn't really know what a research career looked like in particular. I just thought I've enjoyed solving problems all my life and research seems like an opportunity to solve a problem. So I'll try that. And then once I did my honours I thought, that wasn't so bad, I'll keep going. And I think the path in front of me has laid itself in a lot of ways and I've found my feet as I've progressed that I haven't really known in some of the stages what would be ahead for me and just taken a shot in the dark to see how I would go and what would be next.
Wallace Long
What was the support like at Flinders University as you made this progression?
Alex Manson
It was great. I’m still supervised by the same person who was my honours supervisor. Then when I worked for a year at Flinders in Research, she was my supervisor. Did my PhD as her as my primary supervisor. And now my postdoctoral fellowship, she remains my supervisor, Dr. Brittany Johnson. And she's been an amazing support and has really driven my passion for research and for working in this space.
Wallace Long
Turning now to your PhD in public health. You did it as part of your Doctor of Philosophy. Your thesis was exploring Australian parent perspectives of an acceptable school provided meal system. Can you talk to me about school provided meals within Australia compared to the rest of the world?
Alex Manson
Interestingly, Australia is one of the few high income countries that doesn't provide a school meal. Internationally and globally, one in every two children receives a school meal every day.
And Australia, Canada, New Zealand are some of the very few high income countries that don't provide meals. And this is where we're really falling behind. So where other countries adopted those programs post-World War II, really, so they've been quite long standing, some even before. We missed out. We did a bit of milk provision, which isn't the most popular program to ever exist. And then school food provision really remained a parental role.
And we never had a cultural shift in regard to that. So that's where I was drawn to when it came to my research of the opportunity to understand, do parents want a change like this in Australia? Is there opportunity or is there appetite really to do such a transition? And could we be like those other countries? Could we learn from what they've done well, what they've done not so well in some other examples, and transform the way we do school food here?
Wallace Long
I'm reading from your own article within The Conversation and the benefits of good nutrition during school years, supports health, growth, concentration, brain development, and academic achievement.
Alex Manson
Absolutely. With the more research I've done in this space, it seems that you tap into a new potential benefit each time, even developmentally, for children sitting around a table using cutlery or chewing on food can help develop their jaw strength, can help develop their fine motor skills as well.
Environmentally having food provided at school can reduce a lot of food processing and packaging that packaged muesli bars or snacks like that have huge waste implications and schools are a huge producer of waste, especially in South Australia. So, there's some great benefits of school meals and they span beyond just that dietetic lens as well, which excites me as I work in this space that you can have a benefit beyond just your original focus and it really does stretch out across the sector.
Wallace Long
In South Australia we have some breakfast programs such as Kickstart for Kids. Where do they fit into this?
Alex Manson
Yeah, so those programs have expanded really significantly over the past few years and food bank services a really large proportion of our primary schools and secondary schools across South Australia. They do an absolutely brilliant job.
This growing expansion, it's across every school, practically that schools, regardless of what area they're in, there is always a student that might need some food provision or there's a potential benefit to having breakfast provided. So, they're doing an amazing job and doing the best they can to service all these schools. However, we need more support, and cooked meals can really help offer a range of other nutrients that the breakfast programs might not be able to provide.
And help have those other benefits like sitting down and having a shared meal rather than a grab and go model as well. So it can fit really nicely and together that these programs can work hand in hand, use some of those existing suppliers and expand out and create extra opportunities for nutritious food.
Wallace Long
And what are some of the other considerations when you're creating these types of programs within schools?
Alex Manson
Cost is a major one. But making sure that the food we're providing is actually appropriate. So this might mean different dietary requirements, making sure it's allergy aware. Food is culturally appropriate and safe. We have a really diverse community across South Australia that we need to make sure that we're appropriately considering what menus might suit different communities and even providing opportunities for families to bring in recipes or meals that they think would be great to share with the community, as well as the considerations around geographical area.
So, this is something that Food Bank has had to figure out an address for their breakfast program across South Australia and Northern Territory. So how do you transport food to some of our more remote communities in South Australia? And so working with communities and having that led by communities is really important as well to make sure we're addressing the needs of people, but in a way that is appropriate and suitable for them.
So that's really a framework that I like to use to drive me, and that's why this work was driven by the needs of parents and putting people at the centre of the work that's about them.
Wallace Long
And you talk about your work focusing on equitable, nutritious food being available in schools. So you're talking about a macro approach to all schools in Australia.
Alex Manson
Yes, that is the ideal. So we've used a framing before in our research team to say a universal system, but not uniform. So everyone have access or all schools potentially have a school provided meal system, but these can't look the same. They need to be tailored to all of the, you know, what the community needs, what sorts of food it might need, what's safe for the community in terms of allergens, dietary requirements, and food transport as well.
Cost considerations, even what the food service model might look like. Can the food be prepared on site or does it need to be delivered? Does it need to be eaten in the classroom? Or is there an amazing hidden dining room we could tap into?
So it's all these things that mean a system can't be uniform. But ideally, it would be great to see a program like this across all schools because I think we're learning more than ever that there are students and families across the whole of Australia that have a need for food to be provided, as well as there's families across the whole country that would like this program for a range of other reasons, including convenience, providing support.
Families more than ever are working and are busier. Financial challenges don't have time to provide these perfect nutritious lunches we see on social media. So it would really help support families and almost create the village that it does take to raise a child.
Wallace Long
And it would take people away from the convenient processed food to nutritious food.
Alex Manson
Yes, that would be amazing to have beautiful cooked meals that prioritise vegetables and ensure children are addressing some of those nutrients that they're lower in that we know from the data from the past decades that hasn't changed. Unfortunately at the moment, convenience foods are at the forefront because what other options do parents have? We're time poor, we're money, financially it's really challenging. And those are the foods that are pushed and marketed towards us. As well as sometimes you don't know what your child's going to eat when you send them off to school, whether the food will come back at the end of the day. So you don't want to throw something in the bin. A convenience food means that it's temperature stable as well.
Wallace Long
If I understand that correctly, you've done your thesis, you've published the paper, you've done your research, now you're tailoring these programs depending on the stimulus from within each community.
Alex Manson
Absolutely. Yes. So, developing a toolkit of resources which responds to the needs of the community and trying to figure out now how we can iterate those, make sure they're acceptable for people and usable for schools.
As well as evaluating what are the barriers and enablers if they were going to implement school meals, for example, what do they need? So, whether that's funding, if that's additional staff support, expertise, trained chefs that come on site to make sure that this isn't adding another burden for schools. We know that schools are busy and overworked and we don't want to add another thing to their plate. So, this is a great opportunity to really understand how we can improve that.
Wallace Long
Is there an opportunity for the local community to be involved as well?
Alex Manson
Yes, absolutely. There is great opportunity to create this circular economy within communities. So, purchasing food from local suppliers, using the local butcher or the farm down the road, purchasing the seconds from the fruit and vegetable store that might otherwise get thrown in the bin and that helps reduce cost as well. Supporting local farmers and really creating these food communities.
And as well creating job opportunities for members of the community, whether that might be parents who need some employment that's strictly during school hours, and then their opportunity to be very close to their child as well, or local community members who are interested in just having a few hours work a day, or grandparents and volunteers stepping into the school and having a great opportunity to engage with the community as well.
Wallace Long
You were in Tasmania recently presenting at the National School Food Summit. You presented a slide which showed that 90% of parents are interested in school meals and interested parents predominantly want lunchtime meals. Can you talk to me about that data?
Alex Manson
The inaugural Australian School Meals Summit was a great opportunity for people to come together and collaborate and share. That was really off the back of this growing interest in Australia for school-provided meals and conversations.
Happening in different sectors as well as a range of some really large pilot programs. So I was invited to share my research at that summit, which was a real honour. And I shared some work from my thesis, so my fifth and final study, which brought all of my thesis learnings together and surveyed parents across Australia to see: are you interested in school-provided meals? Finding yes, they were, which was terrific.
And of that, most parents were interested in having lunchtime meals and this was really, I think, down to the fact that once you drop your child off at school, it ensures that they're looked after throughout the school day and it saves the convenience of having to pack a lunch box every single day, which can be quite tiresome. And parents really reported to me throughout my studies that that was something that they were really struggling with mentally, time wise, financially as well.
So lunch meals were the highest meal time of interest, and that was definitely talking about a quality meal from nutritious ingredients. So, a cooked meal that could be consumed in a sit-down format that used local produce where possible, that children could really sit down, enjoy together and ensure that they had this really healthy meal. And parents also reported that that would give them a great peace of mind with their child getting home at the end of the day. And if they didn't have time to produce meals that night, you know, they might be running around with sport, working late. They could just provide their child with a sandwich for dinner, and they would feel so much better knowing that they had been cared for that day and they had made sure that they had nutritious food in their bellies.
The other thing parents reported within that study as well was that they were really interested in being involved in what the program looked like. So, yes, while they were interested in having school-provided meals, they wanted it to be aligned with what they needed. So that was the nutritious food, that was ensuring it was equitable, it was affordable and perhaps different costs for families to make sure that that was equitable and appropriate, ensuring that the food was environmentally conscious and encompass education opportunities as well.
So, it wasn't just a food in belly situation. Families wanted to make sure that if we were going to do a program like this, it had to be done right.
Wallace Long
We talk about physical literacy with young people. Do you see a lunchtime program within schools would be equivalent for food literacy for life?
Alex Manson
Absolutely. The opportunity to sit down and talk about food, I think this is something that's done in a brilliant way in French culture in particular. Sit down, talk about food, what it's doing for us, what it means, and then connecting that back to the classroom as well. At the moment, students do often learn about food and nutrition, but it's disconnected from them what happens during the meal time. So it's an opportunity to create this almost lateral learning opportunity across the school day, that the lunch time continues as learning time.
And there is an opportunity to integrate what the food means, even into maths lessons, counting the recipes, things like that. Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden has done work in this space and it's really great to see. So, I see some good opportunities to continue that kind of mindset and framing around. School is a great learning opportunity for every aspect of life, not just literacy numeracy based learning.
Wallace Long
Alex, what does a typical week look like for you?
Alex Manson
Great question. I guess it really depends on what research section I'm up to at that time. So, for example, at the moment, I'm running a study which is providing schools with resources, a school food toolkit we call it, to help them independently design school provided meals. And this is schools that have been interested in doing their own grassroots action and we're trying to understand how we can best support them and then evaluating what they might need or what broader supports could exist.
So with that study, it involves visiting schools, going out and meeting people, which is my very favourite part of my job. Online meetings, lots of those with people from even from my team, but interstate and overseas as well. Grant planning and writing often takes up a bit of time, so one day a week about is spent on that.
And that's just making sure that we've got funding for salaries for future for other people's work and for programs themselves. And then a range of other kind of professional development and meetings. As a researcher, your PhD isn't the end of your learning experience. You just keep going, tapping into different areas and learning different skills. For example, implementation science is a section that I'm really interested in learning more about. So doing some work to upskill myself in that area.
Wallace Long
What surprised you most about the research world?
Alex Manson
I think in general, when I first started dietetics, as I mentioned, I saw that slide about what research is a career opportunity. It even had a photo of someone working in a lab holding a pipette or standing next to a microscope. And I don't ever step foot in a lab and I just sit in front of a computer or go and visit schools most of the time.
And I think realising that research looked quite different depending on what you were researching was a huge learning for me. I also think research can often seem from the outside like it is entirely and only desk based, and all you're doing is writing and doing things behind the scenes. But the way I have tried to frame my job is that I'm working with people at all times.
So, whether that's researching with people, designing with people, understanding what they need and doing your work informed by that has been a really important priority. And I think that's what drives me in this research area, but also keeps your job interesting, that you're not just sitting behind the desk all the time and feeling disconnected from the impact that you're trying to make.
Wallace Long
What have you found hard about research that nobody told you about?
Alex Manson
I think the thing I didn't quite realise, and as I said, I, you know, was slightly blindly stepping into this career at some stage, was realising that there isn't much sustainability in research careers. Funding is really a major limitation for research. So at the moment, for example, I'm supported by a fellowship, which is really terrific and really excited to have that.
But once that ends, you have to keep sourcing your next fellowship or your next pool of funding. And it can be quite tricky because once you receive something, you're almost immediately started working towards the next thing. And having permanency in research is something that's quite hard to come by. So, I think that's something I didn't quite realise is how much of the workload is also supporting funding for not only the work that you want to do, but for you to be able to do that work, which can be quite tricky at times.
Wallace Long
So, does that mean you have to be a self-promoter, and you have to do advocacy work? Is there much support for school-provided meals within Australia?
Alex Manson
Yes, it definitely means you have to be advocating for yourself. And I think that was a skill that I had to learn when I started working in research was being able to frame yourself and promote the work that you're doing is important.
In terms of the school meals as the broader kind of sector and the topic that I work in. It's been really interesting across the few years that I've worked in it, how much it's grown and that I feel like I've grown with it. And so it's a great opportunity to continue on this hopefully rising to trajectory and continue my career working in this space as opportunities increase. I hopefully will be there to be alongside them and take them on as they come. It is a positive area to work in and a great area for future growth as well.
Wallace Long
So, with that funding finishing at the end of twenty-seven, do you see that you have to have some milestones in place before then?
Alex Manson
The aim, I guess, when you have these fellowships is you're always kind of seeking the next one. So currently going through the processes of developing applications for a range of other fellowships and working with other people to see what opportunities might arise. So, it's not a concern. It's just the realistic nature of the research world is that things often are short term and you have to be prepared to be flexible and adaptable to whatever comes up and take on opportunities and write grants and fellowships.
Wallace Long
Alex, if you ran into the version of yourself at day one in doing your bachelor degree, what would you tell yourself about the choice you made?
Alex Manson
I think I'd be happy with the choices I've made. I think I'm really proud of the achievements I've had and the fact that I've completed a PhD early in my career and have made some pretty terrific impacts on the accessibility of nutritious food for children in many different states of Australia. That makes me pretty excited and I think the younger version of myself or the twenty seventeen version of myself would be pretty impressed with that and proud of that.
And I think she would also be quite happy to hear that many of the aspects that she enjoyed about the work that she was doing even at the time, working at places like Sprout Cooking School or working pouring beers in the local pub, that I've found ways to integrate that social aspect into my role currently. So, by going out to schools as much as possible, meetings with people, whether that's remote or going and seeing them.
Finding ways to make research as integrated and person led as possible that you're not losing those aspects of your job or your passions that you're absolutely driven by.
Wallace Long
Alex, with all the work you're doing, the research you've done and also the practical work you're doing within schools at the moment, how is this going to get out to more schools?
Alex Manson
Great question. I guess I have tried to lay some of those foundational research pathways or lay those stones down to understand first of all my honours looking at what children were currently eating, then my thesis and PhD research looking at the potential for transforming a system. And now my current postdoctoral research looking at supporting schools and understanding what they might need. But then, of course, you go, well, where, what's the next stage after that? And so that's where it leads us on to a great opportunity for partnerships and working with organisations across Australia that can support schools with school meals.
There's only so much you can do as a researcher, and you've got to be conscious of bias and scope as well. And so working alongside organisations like canteen organisations or NGOs, government departments who are really interested in exploring school-provided meals. And that's what my next stage of work is looking at.
I'm currently involved in the Australian School Meals Alliance, which has been designed and developed under the auspices of Federation of Canteens in Schools, known as Focis. And that's really driving the collaboration across the school meals sector. So those involved and those who are started working in this space, especially in the growing recent years, bringing those voices together to really foster knowledge exchange, a cohesive advocacy piece to make sure we're all on the same page and we're fighting the same fight, and that we're really informed by best practice, that we're not all trying to do the same thing, trial and error, we can share and say, hey, this worked for us over in South Australia. Do you want to try it? Or here's some information that I learned from my toolkit, for example. Let's roll that research out as much as possible.
That alliance will be a great opportunity to bring voices together and share information across the school meal sector.
Wallace Long
Alex, it's been great to have a chat with you. Thank you so much for your time. I have one last question. As a clinician, you get direct feedback one-on-one from how a patient responds to your recommendations. In the work that you're doing looking to influence a large cohort of young people across the country, where do you get your feedback from?
Alex Manson
Great question. It kind of comes from everywhere. As a researcher, you have to be very open to listening in every way. So that might be listening about your research or gathering research data, or it might be gathering feedback on what people think of you. So even when you're trying to recruit the way people respond to your recruitment e methods, the conversations you might have with your supervisor and make sure you're really engaging in reflective opportunities, ways that I've supervised students and making sure to ask them, Hey, what did you think? Did you enjoy me as a supervisor? And do you have any feedback for me? Especially when you're giving them feedback. As well as just talking to schools and children.
One of the great opportunities of going out to a school, especially one that you've helped with their school meal program, is sitting down with people and saying, Hey, what did you think? If that recipe that you had and I helped design, did you like it? And sometimes they'll say, no. And you have to be really open and honest and comfortable and say, great, what would you like instead? And let you drive what exactly is going to serve them best. Research is a terrific opportunity to put people at the centre.
And you do have to take the ego out of it as much as possible and say, I'll be vulnerable and I'm here to learn from you. I don't know what's best as a researcher. I just might know the best way to capture it or the best way to make sure that's shared.
Wallace Long
Alex, it's been fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing your story.
Alex Manson
Thank you so much for having me, Wallace. It's been terrific.
Wallace Long
Big thanks to Alex for sharing her professional journey.
It'll be interesting to follow Alex's progress as she works to see healthy dietary habits implemented through a school-provided meal system across Australia. Thanks to Flinders University, who provided a space at their city campus for this recording.
A full transcript of this episode, along with links to Alex's profile and the resources mentioned, can be found at Health Practice Insights.
In our next episode, I speak with a young professional who's gone from employee to contractor to clinic owner. You'll hear about the vision and the practical realities of opening a new clinic.
Health Practice Insights is brought to you by C2M Consulting, evidence-based marketing for Allied Health Practitioners.
I'm Wallace Long, thanks for listening.
