Senior Lecturer in Health Policy, Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Anna Matheson is a researcher and teacher in the School of Health at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. Her expertise is in public health, health promotion and the social determinants, with an interest in how complexity influences health and social outcomes.  Through her career, Anna has been working to better understand what complex systems thinking can add to knowledge of societal actions needed to reverse inequality and improve health and wellbeing.  For more than 15 years she has been listening to community and policy perspectives on what constrains and facilitates local action to achieve these goals.  Anna currently leads the evaluation of Healthy Families NZ – a policy initiated but community led health and wellbeing initiative in 10 localities which aims to strengthen prevention systems.

Anna has written in a variety of publicly accessible formats drawing on complex systems to comment on the inequality impacts of Covid-19; the potential for systems change by putting local communities at the centre of policy decision-making; and, how current health reforms could really reorient the health system towards communities. Her teaching over the last decade has included public health, health policy and systems thinking. Anna is a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini – an Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) for complex systems.