Rate My Professor Katherine Hall

Dr Katherine Hall is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Health Care (Dunedin) at the University of Otago, part of the Faculty of Medicine and Dunedin School of Medicine. Her academic qualifications include a BSc(Med) and MBBS from the University of Sydney, PhD and BA from the University of Otago, and she is a Fellow of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (FRNZCGP). She completed her medical training in Sydney and pursued advanced training in intensive care medicine before shifting focus to bioethics, completing her PhD in 2000 on ethics and decision-making in intensive care. Earlier positions at Otago included Research Fellow in the Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care and Tutor in the Bioethics Research Centre. Currently, she is a practising general practitioner one day per week and serves as Convener of Higher Degrees in her department.

Hall's research specializations cover medical humanities, ethics, clinical reasoning, bioethics—including contested illnesses and philosophy of medicine—ethical issues in general practice and primary care, medical decision-making, uncertainty in medical education, and ancient medical history. She provides media commentary on these topics. Notable publications include: "Identifying threshold concepts in postgraduate general practice training: a focus group, qualitative study" (BMJ Open, 2022); "Commentary on an excerpt from the Catoptrum Microcosmicum" (Academic Medicine, 2022); "There is a huge need, and it's growing endlessly": Perspectives of mental health service providers to ethnic Chinese in Aotearoa New Zealand (New Zealand Medical Journal, 2022); "Did Alexander the Great die from Guillain-Barré syndrome?" (Ancient History Bulletin, 2018); "Demetrius Poliorcetes: Did he suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder?" (Australasian Society for Classical Studies Proceedings, 2020); "Medical decision-making: an argument for narrative and metaphor" (Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2002); and "Decision-making in intensive care – a reply to Sundstrom" (Health Care Analysis, 1994). She supervises PhD theses on medical uncertainty and mental health service experiences.