Dr Johanna Lynch

Stream 2 (Peers)

Senior Lecturer with the University of Queensland’s General Practice Clinical Unit

Building Sense of Safety: growing a culture that protects clinician wellbeing.

Her work has received international acclaim from primary care researchers as a paradigm change in approaches to people in distress. It integrates lived experience and Indigenous wisdom with transdisciplinary scientific insights from trauma, attachment, social determinants of health, neurobiology, psychophysiology and psychoneuroimmunology. This work has been published in a peer-reviewed academic book: A Whole Person Approach to Wellbeing: Building Sense of Safety (2021): Routledge and most recently in a paper entitled: The sense of safety theoretical framework: a trauma-informed and healing-oriented approach for whole person care.

Biography

Dr Johanna Lynch MBBS PhD FRACGP FASPM Grad Cert (Grief and Loss) is a Senior Lecturer with The University of Queensland’s General Practice Clinical Unit. She spent the last 15 years of her 25 year career as a GP caring for adults who are survivors of childhood trauma and neglect. This practical clinical work of being with those in our community who are often marginalised, misunderstood, and categorised with multiple mental health diagnoses has led her to search for approaches to the whole person that are applicable across disciplines. She has pioneered approaches that actively work against the fragmentation caused by trauma and neglect. She is clinical advisor to a national domestic and family violence program with Brisbane South PHN, member of the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Governance committee, Advisor to Movember, and is past president of the Australian Society for Psychological Medicine that educates supports and champions GPs and allied health providers who offer complex whole person care. Qualifications: MBBS, FRACGP, FASPM, PhD, Grad Cert (Grief & Loss).