Dr Claire Hutchinson

Dr Hutchinson is a Senior Research Fellow at the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. She is a mixed methods social scientist with research interests in:

• social return on investment analysis of health and social care interventions
• employment pathways for people with disabilities
• the lived experiences and quality of life of social care recipients

Dr Hutchinson has been a named Chief Investigator on over $3.3 million of competitive grant funding and has a strong track record of managing and delivering collaborative end-user focused research.

Dr Hutchinson is sought after nationally and internationally for her expertise on social return on investment analysis, reviewing international grant applications and journal paper submissions for several top-ranked journals, as well as being invited as Chief Investigator onto SROI grants in health and social care.

Her work in disability employment has been across all employment pathways (ADEs, open employment, microenterprise). Dr Hutchinson's current projects include an evaluation of a transition program to improve open employment outcomes for youth with disabilities, the development of a social impact framework for a social enterprise supporting the open employment of people with disabilities, and two projects focused on addressing employers attitudes to employing people with disabilities across several sectors.

Between 2019 and 2022 Claire was a project manager and qualitative lead on an ARC Linkage project developing new quality of life and care experience instruments with aged care consumers for quality assessment and economic evaluation. These tools - Quality of life-Aged Care Consumers (QOL-ACC) and Quality of Care Experience (QCE-ACC) - are now part of the new National Quality Indicators Program in residential aged care. http://www.qol-acc.org/

Full list of publications via Google Scholar

In her pre-academic life Dr Hutchinson worked as an organisational psychologist, project manager and vocational rehabilitation specialist.