About Melanie…

Dr Melanie Jansen is a paediatric intensive care specialist and clinical ethicist. Melanie is interested in everything to do with intensive care: whole-body pathophysiology; intense team work; critical decision making; machines that go beep; and the care of humans in all their raw and complex beauty. Melanie has a Master of Arts in Philosophy and was instrumental in developing the Centre for Children’s Health Ethics and Law (CCHEL) at Children’s Health Queensland. She was CCHEL’s inaugural Clinical Ethics Fellow in 2015. In 2017, Melanie completed a Churchill Fellowship to research ways to enrich and inform development of paediatric clinical ethics services, including how best to harness the power of the arts and humanities for clinical practice.

In her ‘spare’ time she reads books, cooks, tends to multiple cats and her wine cellar, and tries to move as much as possible. Her notebooks are filled with medical mnemonics, physiological equations and poems. She is interested in promoting the arts and creativity in medicine, in building functioning teams in an age of hyper-specialisation, and in bringing more philosophy into the clinical setting.