Rate My Professor Deborah Gillon

Deborah Gillon serves as a Professional Practice Fellow at the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies, University of Otago, Christchurch, within the Division of Health Sciences. She is also recognized as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Nursing. Gillon holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Canterbury, a Master of Health Sciences from the University of Otago, and is qualified as a Registered Nurse and Nurse Practitioner. In her part-time academic capacity, she lectures in undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate nursing programmes. Concurrently, she maintains a clinical role as Nurse Practitioner Community Older Persons with the Canterbury Clinical Network. Her academic interests centre on older persons' health and advanced nursing practice.

Gillon's research contributions focus on health challenges faced by older adults, including pain management, cognitive impairment, multimorbidity, self-management strategies, loneliness, carer stress, and chronic conditions. Notable publications include Abey-Nesbit, R., Bergler, H. U., Keeling, S., Gillon, D., Bullmore, I., Schluter, P. J., & Jamieson, H. (2024). A multistate transition model of changes in loneliness and carer stress among community-dwelling older adults in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australasian Journal on Ageing; Crowe, M., Gillon, D., McCall, C., & Jordan, J. (2019). 'Pain takes over everything': The experience of pain and strategies for management, in Meanings of Pain Volume 2; Burrell, B., Jordan, J., Crowe, M., Wilkinson, A., Jones, V., Harris, S., & Gillon, D. (2019). Using intervention mapping to design a self-management programme for older people with chronic conditions, Nursing Inquiry; Jordan, J., Crowe, M., Gillon, D., McCall, C., Frampton, C., & Jamieson, H. (2018). Reduced pain reports with increasing cognitive impairment in older persons in New Zealand, American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease & Other Dementias; and Jordan, J., Crowe, M., Gillon, D., McCall, C., & Jamieson, H. (2017). The prevalence of pain and its relationship to falls, fatigue and depression in a cohort of older people living in the community, Journal of Advanced Nursing. Additional works encompass clinical effectiveness of transdiagnostic interventions for multimorbidity, mindfulness-based stress reduction for long-term conditions, and wound programmes in residential aged care. Her scholarship has accumulated over 270 citations. Gillon has supervised Master of Health Sciences dissertations on leadership during crises and nurses' perceptions of cancer prevention and early detection in older adults.