Carolyn Adams Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law Conference

Carolyn Adams

Carolyn is an academic and consulting public policy lawyer who specialises in privacy law and practice, administrative law and open government, and issues of institutional trust and transparency. She has over twenty years of experience providing high level legal policy advice to federal, state and territory governments, including NSW Cabinet Office and the federal Attorney-General’s Department. Immediately prior to joining Macquarie University as a full time academic in 2011, Carolyn worked with the Australian Law Reform Commission for eight years on the following inquiries: Essentially Yours: The Protection of Genetic Information in Australia (ALRC Report 96) 2003; Same Crime, Same Time: Sentencing of Federal Offenders (ALRC Report 103) 2006; For Your Information: Australian Privacy Law and Practice (ALRC Report 108) 2008 and Secrecy Laws and Open Government in Australia (ALRC Report 112) 2009. In her academic career, Carolyn has conducted extensive qualitative research in the area of the handling of personal health information for secondary purposes. Her PhD focused on decision making processes that facilitate access to government data collections of personal information for health research. She has published widely in this area including a co-authored book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, titled 'Sharing Linked Data for Health Research: Towards Better Decision Making'. She is currently engaged in a major research project with the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre on building public confidence in the secondary use of general practice data for research.