DoctorLarissa Bartlett

CURRENT RESEARCH

Larissa's ParkinsonNet Fellowship involves working with people with Parkinson's and allied health professionals to co-design adaptations the Dutch ParkinsonNet model of care to make it suitable for the Australian context. The ParkinsonNet model has been shown to improve outcomes for people with Parkinson's in the Netherlands and several other european countries. In Australia, the model will need to accommodate very different population density and challenges of distance, and adaptations we make will be piloted in Tasmania and Western Victoria before national roll-out.

Larissa's ISLAND Fellowship follows on from her Postdoctoral role with the ISLAND team. Since 2025 Larissa has been analysing data generated by one of these sub-studies, the ISLAND Resilience Project, to understand behavioural and psychosocial factors that predict healthier ageing and lower dementia risk over time.

Larissa's publications illustrate the impact of health-education, loneliness, social connectedness, attending to hearing loss, and psychological resources such as mindfulness, on quality of life and dementia risk progression. Her work highlights the importance of longitudinal public health cohort-based research for identifying potential public health 'levers' that can support healthy ageing.

Larissa is senior investigator for Water Under the Bridge: a research project investigating the long-term take-aways for people who have completed mindfulness training courses run by Mindfulness Programs Australasia, through a 9-year Primary Health Tasmania-funded community health program. This mixed methods study begins to address the lack of evidence for the long-term effects of mindfulness training - a significant gap in the field. 

COMPLETED RESEARCH

• (Tasmanian Government Tender) WorkSafe Tasmania: A statewide benchmarking study of organisational capabilities for managing employee mental health. Presented at the European Association for Occupational Health Psychology Conference in Granada 2024.
• (Contract research) Refinement of the Observed Mindfulness Measure and creation of the Observed Mindful Behaviours Scale. A project supported by the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, Monash University, to extend findings from Larissa's doctoral research and produce a valid, reliable observer-report mindfulness questionnaire. (Paper published)
• (Contract research) Measurement of Organizational Systems Capacity and Functioning; part of the Pathways In Place Project, funded by the Ramsay Foundation. Supported by Ramsay Foundation grant recipients at Victoria University and Griffith University. Larissa was engaged by the Project Team to collect data and conduct psychometric review of this novel measure of health system functioning. (Paper published)
• (ISLAND Fellowship) An investigation of modifiable dementia risk factors in the ISLAND cohort, and the effects over time of cohort engagement and increasing dementia risk reduction knowledge through a Preventing Dementia MOOC.
• (Student research) A high impact meta-analytic review, two randomised controlled trials (one pilot with inactive control, one fully powered 3-arm trial), and creation of a novel 9-item observer-report questionnaire for cross-validating self-reported findings in survey-based mindfulness research.