Staff Profile

Dr Ben Ewald completed his undergraduate training at the University of Newcastle in 1982, the then Family Medicine program training in 1992 and a masters in epidemiology in 1996. He worked as a GP  in Sydney, then for 10 years in Alice Springs. While at Congress, the Aboriginal medical service in Alice he saw for the first time a community health centre that could identify its community, and had a realistic involvement in their public health issues as well as the provision of sick care. In the Central Australian context with such a high disease burden it was glaringly obvious that access to primary care, and basing that care on effective treatments were areas that could benefit from applied epidemiology.

General practice research interests have included a study of the economics of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, and the diagnostic accuracy of B Natriuretic Peptide for heart failure. He has also taken part in community wide physical activity research and from 2011 is running an RCT in physical activity promotion. He has a role in public health advocacy on  issues of environments to promote physical activity, and interpreting scholarship on environmental risks to health.

Now a GP in Newcastle, he teaches in the epidemiology masters program at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Newcastle and co ordinates the communicable disease epidemiology and research protocol design subjects as well as teaching in the undergraduate medical course.

Current research directions include development of new analytic methods for data from accelerometers for use in physical activity research, bringing objective measurement of physical activity into clinical practice settings, and analysis of health system data to make cycling safer.