Rate My Professor Lise Johns

Dr. Lise Johns serves as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Human Services and Social Work at Griffith University, part of the Health faculty. She holds a Bachelor of Social Work with First Class Honours from Griffith University, awarded in 2007, and a PhD completed in 2014, with her doctoral research examining the psychosocial needs of terminally ill clients residing in rural and remote areas of Australia. Before entering academia full-time, Johns worked as a hospital social worker from 2007 to 2014. Her roles included positions in a mental health unit and as a generalist social worker in a small rural hospital, where she developed substantial expertise working with palliative care patients and their families.

Since obtaining her PhD, Dr. Johns has been employed as a full-time lecturer and researcher at Griffith University. Her academic interests and research specializations encompass end-of-life care, palliative care service delivery, bereavement support, assisted dying, and the psychosocial dimensions of palliative care, with particular attention to rural and remote communities, incarcerated populations, and diverse cultural perspectives. Notable publications include "COVID-19, Prolonged Grief Disorder and the Role of Social Work" (2020), which has garnered 76 citations; "Maybe for Unbearable Suffering: Diverse Racial, Ethnic and Cultural Perspectives of Assisted Dying. A Scoping Review" (2024, 25 citations); "Trauma-Informed Tertiary Learning and Teaching Practice Framework" (2020, 14 citations); "A Qualitative Interpretive Meta-Synthesis of Social Workers’ Experience in End-of-Life Care" (2023, 10 citations); and "A Systematic Literature Review Exploring the Psychosocial Aspects of Palliative Care Provision for Incarcerated Persons: A Human Rights Perspective" (2022, 10 citations). Recent works address supporting children in assisted dying cases (2025) and innovative educational tools like gamified resources to enhance healthcare students' research skills and attitudes (2025). Through her scholarship, Johns contributes to advancing social work practices in palliative and bereavement care, including bereavement risk screening, grief management amid COVID-19, and culturally sensitive approaches to end-of-life issues. She is also involved in teaching social work courses and interprofessional health education at Griffith University.