Professor Elizabeth Beattie

Biography

Professor Elizabeth Beattie (RN, PhD, FGSA) has extensive clinical nursing, curriculum development, teaching and research experience in psychiatry and gerontology and has worked with people with dementia and their caregivers for over 25 years.  She is the Director, Dementia Collaborative Research Centre: Carers and Consumers (2008-2014); Director of the Queensland Dementia Training Study Centre (2013-2014) and Professor of Aged Care and Dementia, School of Nursing (2008-2014) all at the Queensland University of Technology.  Professor Beattie holds Adjunct or Honorary appointments at James Cook University and the University of Queensland in Australia, and the University of Iowa and Pennsylvania State University in USA. Professor Beattie has an international reputation in psychogeriatric nursing, specialising in dementia-related behavioural symptom aetiology and nonpharmacological intervention development.  She has extensive experience with research in the residential aged care sector, including complex multi-site investigations. Her collaborative work on understanding and managing wandering in long-term care is known and used internationally, as it is the only existing scale (Revised Algase Wandering Scale-Long Term Care) for measuring wandering behaviour. Another focus is on the quality of life in long-term care facilities, as evidenced by the recent completion of the first nationally representative examination of the quality of life of people with dementia in Australian residential aged care facilities. Professor Beattie has extensive involvement with the aged care and dementia communities via her associations with Alzheimer’s Australia Qld and the Alzheimer’s Australia Consumer Dementia Research Network. In her role as Director, Qld Dementia Training Study Centre she leads a program of research-based educational seminars promoting community interactions on clinical practice and research.  She works directly with two major residential aged care providers in establishing research-based clinical change programs and serves on the HREC of a large residential aged care provider.  She is also a member of the advisory groups for Qld DBMAS, the Qld Health Dementia Care Network and the DOHA-funded Dementia Behaviour Practice Guidelines revision group and was recently appointed to the Scientific Review Committee of Alzheimer’s Australia.

 Research Interests

• etiology and management of challenging behaviors (e.g. wandering) associated with dementia
• nutritional status, weight loss and energy expenditure in persons with dementia
• decisional capacity and informed consent issues in dementia.
• quality of life for persons with dementia and carers.