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Behind the numbers
Caroline F Finch AO
From collecting stamps and organising dolls as a child, a fascination with order and patterns has led Edith Cowan University’s Professor Caroline Finch to rise to the top of the research world in sports injury prevention and recovery, using her mathematics knowledge to codify injuries into datasets that could be used by institutions around the country.
Statistics is a type of mathematics concerned with analysing data to identify patterns in it and answering questions that can only be answered with objective evidence. Throughout my career, I have specialised in biostatistics and epidemiology, which is where statistics is applied to addressing health issues. The important role of epidemiology in monitoring health has been brought to the public’s attention recently through COVID-19 updates in the media and through government and health advisory bodies. But I have done my most important work in sports medicine and the prevention of sports injuries.
Sometimes I am asked “Why did you become a statistician/mathematician?”. To be honest, the question takes me a bit aback because I do not think I ever “became” a statistician/mathematician, rather I always was one -its who I have always been. As a child and adolescent, I was very interested in the natural world around me.
I often asked the “why is it so?” type questions and answers came to me naturally by observing what I saw, keeping an eye on the detail, looking for patterns, noticing when things were different to normal, documenting and ordering things. I loved all forms of puzzles, categorising and ordering my prized possessions (whether it was my stamp collection or books or dolls or my wardrobe), making and designing clothes, conducting cooking experiments and was an avid reader of the history of science/medicine, especially of the place of women in this.
I think that many girls and young women would also have similar interests and hobbies to these – a career in statistics could also be ideal for them!
I went to an all-girls School, where only 6 of us in Year 12 undertook double maths subjects, so it was not a big focus there. While I tended to be better at mathematics than other subjects without really trying, my favourite subject was biology, especially when topics covered what diseases people got, who was more likely to get them and why. All classic questions that epidemiologists ask, though I did not know it at the time.
When I was studying at university in the early 1980’s there was not yet wide-spread recognition of the value of applying statistical approaches to health. It was only in my final year of study that I discovered there was a whole field called biostatistics, which was statistics especially applied to medicine. I’d found what I wanted to do!
I went on to undertake a Masters by Research degree which involved using statistical models to describe how cells in the body changed how they replicated themselves to end up making cancers. After that I switched my disease focus to diabetes and for my PhD in Statistics, I applied new analysis approaches to determine when to diagnose diabetes based on the level of sugar in blood when doing large-scale population screening for the disease.
As is often the situation for young researchers commencing their post study career, I needed to change the focus of what topic I worked on to suit where a job opportunity arose. In the early 1990’s, I was fortunate to be appointed as researcher in Australia’s (and indeed one of the world’s) top injury research centres. Very soon, I was sure that I would spend the rest of my career doing injury prevention research.
It was not long before I then identified that my primary interest would be in sports injury and its prevention. Personally, I’d had some history of injury associated with my own participation in different types of social sport. But I had not been aware of what I could have done to prevent them or to recover better from those injuries. I now had this knowledge and wanted to pass that on to others to make sure that other people did not suffer musculoskeletal injuries like I had.
But it was also apparent that not much was known about who, other than elite athletes, got sports injuries because there was little or no data readily available. So, this is where my background in statistics was really valuable and meant that I could do something that no-one else had done before. I was the first person to describe the most common types of sports injuries across Australian community sport. I developed new ways to collect sports injury data and to report them in a way that made sense to sports bodies, government agencies, sports medicine professionals and injured people. I established new databases for sports injury and set future standards for how the data should be coded and classified.
I still do this sort of research and am recognised as one of the top people world-wide who does this work. Perhaps the highest recognition of the importance of my statistical approach to sports injury data was the invitation to be part of an expert group led by the International Olympic Committee which, in 2020, published the first ever international guidelines for sports medicine professionals on how to collect and report data on injury and illness in sport.
Looking back over my career, I can see how everything has led to where I am now. Advice to my younger self would be to remain true to your own core-values, innate strengths and interests. In my experience, it has been when these have matched well with the area I have worked in, that career success as a statistician was guaranteed. And, do not overlook the power of having strong mentors to support you and positive role models to emulate – you learn a lot from them.
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In 2016 I published a blog article titled Moonshots for Australia: 7 For Now. It’s one of many I have posted on business and innovation in Australia. In that book, I highlighted a number of Industries of the Future among a number of proposed Moonshots. I self-published a book, Innovation in Australia – Creating prosperity for future generations, in 2019, with a follow-up COVID edition in 2020. There is no doubt COVID is causing massive disruption. Prior to COVID, there was little conversation about National Sovereignty or supply chains. Even now, these topics are fading, and we remain preoccupied with productivity and jobs! My motivation for this writing has been the absence of a coherent narrative for Australia’s business future. Over the past six years, little has changed. The Australian ‘psyche’ regarding our political and business systems is programmed to avoid taking a long-term perspective. The short-term nature of Government (3 to 4-year terms), the short-term horizon of the business system (driven by shareholder value), the media culture (infotainment and ‘gotcha’ games), the general Australian population’s cynical perspective and a preoccupation with a lifestyle all create a malaise of strategic thinking and conversation. Ultimately, it leads to a leadership vacuum at all levels. In recent years we have seen the leadership of some of our significant institutions failing to live up to the most basic standards, with Royal Commissions, Inquiries and investigations consuming excessive time and resources. · Catholic Church and other religious bodies · Trade Unions · Banks (and businesses generally, take casinos, for example) · the Australian Defence Force · the Australian cricket teams · our elected representatives and the staff of Parliament House As they say, “A fish rots from the head!” At best, the leadership behaviour in those institutions could be described as unethical and, at worst….just bankrupt! In the last decade, politicians have led us through a game of “leadership by musical chairs” – although, for now, it has stabilised. However, there is still an absence of a coherent narrative about business and wealth creation. It is a challenge. One attempt to provide such a narrative has been the Intergenerational Reports produced by our federal Government every few years since 2002. The shortcomings of the latest Intergenerational Report Each Intergenerational Report examines the long-term sustainability of current government policies and how demographic, technological, and other structural trends may affect the economy and the budget over the next 40 years. The fifth and most recent Intergenerational Report released in 2021 (preceded by Reports in 2002, 2007, 2010 and 2015) provides a narrative about Australia’s future – in essence, it is an extension of the status quo. The Report also highlights three key insights: 1. First, our population is growing slower and ageing faster than expected. 2. The Australian economy will continue to grow, but slower than previously thought. 3. While Australia’s debt is sustainable and low by international standards, the ageing of our population will pressure revenue and expenditure. 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