2012 Healthy Development Adelaide Award

Professor Vivienne Moore was presented with the Healthy Development Adelaide Award at the 8th annual HDA Oration; ‘Women, empowerment and health for all'.

Vivienne Moore has held a teaching and research appointment in the Discipline of Public Health at the University of Adelaide since 2001. She is a social epidemiologist with scholarly interests in life course epidemiology, social theory, and the social determinants of health, including gender roles and relations.

Vivienne’s research interests include women’s health and the related area of long-term consequences of early life experiences. She has been awarded substantial NHMRC funding, including two NHMRC “Healthy Start to Life” Strategic Awards, and has published over 50 co-authored refereed articles.

She is noted for fostering and engaging in multi-disciplinary research. Vivienne co-directs, with Associate Professor Michael Davies (Discipline of Obstetrics and Gynaecology), the Life Course and Intergenerational Health Research group. In 2011, Vivienne and Michael were jointly awarded the Basil Hetzel Award for Leadership in Public Health (Public Health Association of Australia, SA Branch).

Oration overview: Women’s reproductive ‘choices’ are profoundly shaped by gender relations and their socio-economic circumstances over the life course. Thus, changing deeply established ways of living requires more than the provision of information. Messages therein depicting women as vessels for the next generation are also problematic. Paradoxically, this may undermine women’s capacity to improve their health, through reinforcing the ‘self-sacrificial mother’ identity in which time to care for themselves is lowest in women’s hierarchy of concerns and entitlements. Improving women’s health is a goal in its own right and there are promising examples of health promotion through empowerment to achieve this. Reductions in sexually transmitted disease and teenage pregnancy are among the wide-ranging health benefits. For children, benefits include a safe family environment and, potentially, improved health, school achievement, and life opportunities. Also important is the need for men and fathers to take a stronger role in maintaining their own health, that of their partners, and the next generation.