Ellie Johnson

Ellie Johnson is a PhD student in He Kāinga Oranga at the University of Otago, Wellington. She holds a Master of Applied Statistics from Massey University and is completing a PhD in Public Health under the supervision of Professor Nevil Pierse and Dr Elinor Chisholm. Ellie’s PhD is an evaluation of the Healthy Homes Initiative (HHI), a government programme which aims to reduce the incidence of housing-related illness among children in Aotearoa by improving housing quality. There are currently 17 HHI community providers around the country who have graciously gifted their data for this project. She will be using the Integrated Data Infrastructure, a research database, to explore outcomes for participants of the programme from a range of domains, including both health and education. This PhD will build on the ground-breaking work of He Kāinga Oranga which showed that improved housing, including insulation and heating, improves health outcomes. This has knock-on effects, such as less absences from school for children, which will be explored during the evaluation.