Associate Professor Holly Seale (BSc, MPH, PhD) is a social scientist at the School of Population Health, University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on improving communication strategies and strengthening community engagement with infectious disease and public health initiatives in Australia and globally. With a background in biomedical science and a PhD in epidemiology, Holly examines the social, programmatic, and provider-level factors that shape engagement with health interventions. Insights from her work inform the co-design of innovative strategies to support immunisation uptake, infection prevention, pandemic planning, and antimicrobial resistance initiatives, ensuring that interventions are both evidence-based and responsive to the needs of diverse communities.

Holly’s research also addresses the quality use of medicines and the role of patients and communities in infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship. Within hospital settings, she has led studies exploring how to strengthen patient participation in infection control practices, recognising that effective engagement can reduce the spread of healthcare-associated infections and improve safety. She has collaborated with clinicians, patients, and policymakers to identify opportunities for involving consumers more actively in stewardship activities, including improving understanding of antibiotic use and supporting informed decision-making. Beyond the hospital, Holly’s research has examined antimicrobial stewardship in community pharmacies in high-income settings, focusing on the role of pharmacists in AMS strategies.

More recently, her work has expanded to resource-constrained settings, including Bangladesh and Sierra Leone, where she has explored how health system limitations, workforce pressures, and community expectations shape antibiotic use. Her findings highlight the challenges pharmacists and drug vendors face in balancing patient demands, limited diagnostic resources, and norms around antibiotic provision, including non-prescription sales. She recently completed a co-design project in rural Bangladesh to develop context-specific stewardship strategies for community pharmacies, in a setting where antibiotics are predominantly purchased from unlicensed shops.

More information on Holly is available on her institutional profile.

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