The 2026 Dr Arthur and Mary Newnham Fellowship has been awarded to three doctors working to improve rural health and medical education.
The Rural Clinical School of Western Australia (RCSWA) administers the Fellowship each year and awards bursaries of up to $12,000 in total.
Joint 2026 Newnham Fellow Dr Astrid Turner is a Public Health Physician/Senior Lecturer at the WA Centre for Rural Health (WACRH) in Geraldton and works to reduce health inequities in rural and underserved communities through research, teaching and community co‑design.
The bursary will assist Dr Turner to enrol in a Graduate Certificate in Health Professions Education at The University of Western Australia and support her proposed research project: Understanding and optimising doctor engagement in continuing medical education in the Midwest: a discrete choice experiment.
Dr Turner said she was incredibly grateful to receive the Fellowship and would combine her interests in public health, education and workforce development to better understand what rural and remote doctors value in professional development.
“The Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) will estimate doctors’ willingness to accept different attributes such as time commitment, content and delivery format in exchange for greater professional value from network activities,” she said.
“I hope the findings will help create more effective educational opportunities, strengthen the rural medical workforce and ultimately improve health outcomes in underserved communities.”
GP and RCSWA Bunbury Medical Coordinator Dr Dee Arnold will also use the bursary to enrol in the Graduate Certificate in Health Professions Education at UWA.
“I’m very excited to be offered part of the Newnham fellowship and feel fortunate that financial support like this exists to enable upskilling of rural healthcare professionals,” she said.
“Part of my study includes critically appraising research studies, and I have chosen to focus on mentoring of medical students and junior doctors. I want to help optimise the support RCSWA and Regional Training Hubs provide to medical students and junior doctors working in rural and remote areas.”
Paediatrician and RCSWA Busselton Medical Coordinator Dr Brad MacDonald is using the bursary to progress his research project: Prioritising equitable access to rare disease clinical trials in Western Australia using multi-criteria decision modelling (1000Minds): a rural-informed, statewide framework.
This structured, transparent framework will prioritise which patients, sites, and trial opportunities should be developed or scaled in rural contexts.
It will also ensure equitable inclusion of rural and metropolitan populations, with a focus on paediatric populations and equitable statewide applicability.
Dr MacDonald said the bursary will directly fund platform access for 1000Minds, the multi-criteria decision analysis tool the project is built around.
The project is in the final stages of ethics approval and once finalised, stakeholder engagement and the building of the prioritisation framework itself will follow.
“The Fellowship means access to a proven, rigorous methodology rather than an ad hoc one, a distinction that matters enormously when what's being decided is which trials families living with rare disease in rural and remote WA get access to - this matters more as trial work increases for rare diseases and we have to prioritise trials against a set of real-world limitations,” he said.
“This funding takes us a genuine step closer to a transparent, defensible way of prioritising trial selection for rural and rare communities, rather than leaving it to chance or whoever happens to be closest to Perth.”
The late GP Dr Arthur Newnham and his wife Mary were passionate about supporting doctors in rural areas. Their children, Dr Ian Newnham, Ms Helen Newnham, Professor John Newnham and Mrs Jill Morgan, are helping to realise their parents’ vision through the Fellowship.
Image: Dr Astrid Turner, Dr Dee Arnold and Dr Brad MacDonald.