A health policy expert recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours List says there is still a lot of work to be done if Australia wants to improve health outcomes for its most disadvantaged citizens.

Dr Gwen Gray Jamieson has been named an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for "distinguished" service to the community and particularly through better women's health outcomes, advocacy and the development of public policy.

Dr Gray Jamieson, a former nurse turned academic, has been heavily involved in women's health and health policy during her career and said even though there had been much progress in recent decades, disadvantaged people in Australia continued to have poorer health outcomes.

She first became interested in the need for preventative care during her career as a nurse.

"If we want to improve population health, there's a whole lot that needs to be done to lift those in the worst and the most disadvantaged positions out of that and to give them the strong primary health care services that they need – they need support to improve healthy lifestyles, they need health literacy, they need education," she said.

"The better off you are, the better your health outcomes so improving health outcomes is a really comprehensive thing. Public policy has to take a very broad-brush approach if we want to improve population health. "That's very important for women because we know women are the most economically disadvantaged. They're more economically disadvantaged than men and most of the single parent families are headed by women so this affects a lot of children so it's very important for women's health to do something about those who have the poorest health outcomes because they have the poorest life circumstances.

"We in the women's health movement have been trying to say for 30, 40 years now that we need to look much further than just curing people when they get sick. We need to look at the condition of people's lives, put them in a better position and reduce the amount of treatment that we need by keeping people much more healthy in the first place," she said.

Dr Gray Jamieson's resume is littered with impressive accomplishments, showing her dedication to the women's health movement and public policy.

A published author, Dr Gray Jamieson has been the deputy chair of the Australian Women's Health Network since 2012, contributed to the 1989 National Women Health Policy and the National Preventative Health Research Strategy and devised and convened the 2008 National Women's Health Summit to name a few.

She said it was very gratifying to be recognised for her work, but it was also an acknowledgement of the important role played by the non-government sector in health policy.

"It's a recognition of the input into public policy that the non-government sector makes. I think that is terribly important because it actually enhances Australian democracy tremendously because the non-government sector represents the individuals and groups of people who don't get their voices heard at policy tables very often," she said.