Dr. Lisa Nalau

Dr. Lisa Nalau is a public health physician based at Vila Central Hospital and seconded to the Vanuatu Ministry of Health's Public Health Directorate. With 9 years of public health experience, Dr. Nalau leads communicable disease surveillance, outbreak response, and health promotion programmes across Vanuatu's 80-plus inhabited islands.

Vanuatu's public health challenges are amplified by its geography — a long, scattered archipelago in the cyclone belt — and its climate vulnerability. Dr. Nalau has been at the forefront of Vanuatu's disaster health response, leading health emergency operations following Cyclone Pam and subsequent cyclone events, managing waterborne disease outbreaks, and coordinating the COVID-19 public health response.

Dr. Nalau is trilingual in English, French, and Bislama, which is essential for health communication across Vanuatu's bilingual official language system and its more than 100 indigenous languages. She is an active participant in regional Pacific public health networks and represents Vanuatu at WHO Western Pacific technical meetings.

Dr. Nalau completed her MBBS at the Fiji School of Medicine and her Master of Public Health (MPH) at the University of the South Pacific, with a focus on Pacific epidemiology and disaster health management. Her MPH thesis examined health system resilience in small island developing states following natural disasters.

She has completed Field Epidemiology Training through the WHO Pacific Field Epidemiology Training Programme (FETP) and has undertaken training in health emergency preparedness and response through the Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network (PPHSN). She participated in a public health fellowship at the Australian National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) in Canberra.

Dr. Nalau's expertise lies in population health, communicable disease surveillance, and emergency health response. Her core competencies include outbreak investigation and response (including foodborne illness, waterborne disease, and vector-borne disease outbreaks), immunisation programme coordination and monitoring, and health communication and promotion in multilingual Pacific island settings.

She advises on malaria control strategy, dengue prevention, and environmental health interventions. In disaster health, she leads the health emergency operations centre activities following cyclones and other natural hazards, coordinating health facility assessments, supply chain restoration, and disease surveillance in the aftermath of disasters.

Dr. Nalau is dedicated to serving Vanuatu's communities through public health research that addresses the nation's vulnerability to natural hazards and communicable diseases. She has published in the Western Pacific Surveillance and Response Journal (WPSAR) on cyclone-related disease outbreaks in Vanuatu and contributed to a Lancet Planetary Health paper on climate change and health in Pacific small island developing states.

She is a co-investigator on a New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT)-funded project on Pacific health system resilience to climate change impacts and presents regularly at the Pacific Public Health Conference.

As a public health physician, Dr. Nalau's primary focus is population health rather than individual patient care. She can provide public health advice to international organisations, NGOs, and development partners working in Vanuatu's health sector.

For individual patients seeking clinical care in Vanuatu, the VCH outpatient department is the primary point of contact. Dr. Nalau can advise on health risks, prevention, and appropriate health facilities for visitors to Vanuatu, including guidance on travel health precautions relevant to Vanuatu's communicable disease environment.

Dr. Nalau has received the Vanuatu Ministry of Health Public Health Award for her leadership of the COVID-19 surveillance and response programme. She received a commendation from the Pacific Community (SPC) for contributions to Pacific health security, and the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office acknowledged her contributions to cyclone disaster health response following Cyclone Harold in 2020.