Nicola Esterman
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Name: Nicola Esterman
E-mail: info@hoi.com.au
Qualifications:
• Bachelor of Psychology (Honours)
• Graduate Certificate in Drug & Alcohol Counselling (in progress)
• Graduate Certificate in Grief and Palliative Care Counselling (in progress)
Specific Competence:
Nicola has had extensive experience conducting national and international literature reviews. Currently Nicola is working with a team to produce a systematic review of literature on endometrial cancer for Cancer Australia, which will be used to create clinical guidelines. Previously, Nicola worked for two years as a Research Assistant in the Flinders Human Behaviour and Health Research Unit. In this position, Nicola researched and wrote a systematic literature review to be used for the South Australian Department of Health’s Do It For Life program - on the evidence for smoking, alcohol and stress interventions. From this literature review Nicola created key recommendations for the best practice models for these interventions.
Nicola also worked for a year as a Research Assistant for the Statewide Gambling Therapy Service. In this capacity, Nicola organised client follow-up for people who had undergone therapy and were taking part in a relapse prevention program. This position involved a wide range of data collection and entry, often by individual telephone interviews. She also helped design and run the follow-up program, which investigating the most successful ways to encourage continued participation in the program. In her honours thesis investigating the efficacy of health promotion programs in changing employees’ health behaviours, Nicola also created several questionnaires, organised data collection, collated, coded and stored data as part of a health promotion program evaluation and conduct appropriate statistical and qualitative analysis of the data. Nicola also conducted the data analysis for a project on hearing loss in the elderly and the use of hearing aids, for the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology of Flinders University.