Research Projects

The Epidemiology Unit in the Doherty Institute undertakes surveillance for influenza-like illness (ILI) from a network of sentinel general practices from May to October each year. ILI data are used to epidemiologically characterise influenza seasons in Victoria, and provide a practical alternative measure of influenza activity in the community to notifiable laboratory confirmed influenza. The Epidemiology Unit has also recently established a collaboration with the Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre at The University of Melbourne, in which data on patients presenting with upper respiratory tract infections to ten general practices over a five year period will be extracted from general practice software. The aim of this project is to assess whether the epidemiological information provided by automated data extraction is supplementary or redundant to that provided from sentinel general practices network.

This project would suit students with analytical skills, familiarity with statistical software such as Stata or R, and an interest in understanding how infectious data are used, understood and reported.