Jean Hailes for Women’s Health, Australia

Dr. Elizabeth Farrell is a gynaecologist in private practice in Melbourne.

She retired in 2016 as Head of the Menopause Unit at Monash Medical Centre after 34 years of service. During her leadership, she established the first Australian Early Menopause and Adult Turner’s Syndrome Follow up Clinics as well as the first Menopause after Cancer clinic in Victoria.

For many years, she has consulted two monthly in rural Victoria, to provide a service for women in rural communities.

In 2009, she was awarded an AM, Member in the General Division of the Order of Australia for her services to women’s health. In 2013, she was presented with the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Monash University.

Dr. Farrell is a past president of the Australasian Menopause Society and the Asia Pacific Menopause Federation. She is a founder and a Board Member of the Jean Hailes For Women’s Health, a not for profit charity, in honour of Dr. Jean Hailes who established the first menopause clinic in Australia in 1971, the second in the world.

Since 2013, she has travelled yearly with a team of Australian health professionals to Mongolia to lecture and teach both in the capital city hospitals and in remote provinces. In 2018, she was awarded a Visiting Professorship at the National Mongolian University of Medical Sciences for her work. In 2023 and 2024, she returned to Mongolia after a four-year absence due to the Covid pandemic.

Her particular interest is in educating women and health professionals about menopause, iron deficiency in women’s health and other aspects of general gynaecology.