Anastasia Katherine "Anna" Donald (née Courtice; 1966 — 1 February 2009) was an Australian pioneer in the field of evidence-based medicine.
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Donald was educated at North Sydney Girls High School; Wesley College, University of Sydney, from which she graduated in 1989 as a bachelor of arts, majoring in history and preclinical medicine; the University of Oxford, where she received a bachelor of medicine and surgery degree; and Harvard University, where she graduated with a master's degree in public policy and degrees in medicine, economics and history. She was the second woman from New South Wales to win a Rhodes Scholarship, an honour previously awarded to her paternal grandfather.
While at Sydney University, Donald won the Henry Lawson Prize for a collection of short stories. In 1988, she presided over the World Universities Debating Championship, held in Sydney. It was at that event that she met Michael Hall, her future husband and then a member of the winning debating team, from Oxford. She was Honorary Treasurer of the University of Sydney Union from 1986–87, and President of the University of Sydney Union from 1987-88.
Donald worked as a doctor and lecturer in epidemiology and public policy at University College London, and on the Whitehall Study on public health. In 1988, with Dr Vivek Muthu, she founded Bazian, a company which, according to its website, “provides evidence-based consulting and analysis to support the rational assessment, configuration and commissioning of healthcare services”.
Donald was a founding editor of the British Medical Journal's Clinical Evidence, the Journal Of Evidence-Based Healthcare and Evidence Based Health Policy; and the author or co-author of The Hands-on Guide for Junior Doctors and House Officers Guide To Survival.
In 2003, while living in the United Kingdom, Donald was reunited with Michael Hall, who had become a lawyer. Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. They married in 2005 in St. James Church, Sydney. In February 2007, she learned that her cancer had metastasised. Later that year she and her husband returned to Sydney. In April 2008, she began writing a blog for the online version of the British Medical Journal. It was called From the Other Side and chronicled her living with cancer. Her last post was on 22 December 2008.
Donald died of breast cancer on 1 February 2009, aged 42, at Mater Hospital, Sydney.