Rate My Professor Anna Holmes

Anna Holmes serves as Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Department of General Practice at the Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, within the Division of Health Sciences. She earned her MBChB from Edinburgh Medical School and completed a PhD at the University of Otago in 2011 with the thesis "Embracing the Paradox: Spiritual Issues in General Practice." Her extensive career spans 42 years as a general practitioner across diverse locations, including Scotland, rural and urban New Zealand, Tanzania, and Bangladesh. She has worked in student health, rural practice, as a medical manager in a regional health authority such as liaison Assistant Medical Superintendent in Chief for the Canterbury Area Health Board, and in palliative care as Medical Officer at Otago Community Hospice. Holmes also holds a part-time position as Professional Practice Fellow at the Otago Medical School.

With 30 years of experience facilitating workshops on spirituality and human growth, Holmes's research focuses on spiritual dimensions in general practice, cure versus healing, contemplation, bearing witness to suffering, holistic treatment addressing mind, body, and spirit, and fostering hope. In her 2012 New Zealand Medical Journal article "The Ethics of Care," she addresses deficiencies in clinical communication, stressing the ethical imperatives of beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy, justice, confidentiality, and truth-telling. She highlights risks from incomplete hospital letters lacking diagnoses, investigations, treatments, medications, and results in referrals and discharges, advocating standardized forms, audits, and IT systems mandating complete information for safe patient care. Her contributions extend to bioethics discussions on spiritual care at life's end and caregiver challenges, informed by cross-cultural clinical practice.