Peter Mac nurses Reneae McDougall, Elizabeth Crone and Belinda Lambros have been announced as the Learning Health System Academy Fellows for 2023.

The program, which had its inaugural intake this year, is delivered by The Centre for Digital Transformation of Health at The University of Melbourne.

The Fellows will be supported to deliver projects that advance digital health initiatives at Peter Mac, with a view to improving patient outcomes across both Peter Mac and the wider community.

Renae McDougall is a medical health consultation liaison nurse, aiming to lead projects centred on service improvement for consumers. Her project will develop an EMR based solution to help nurses identify patients at risk of clinical aggression and support appropriate, compassionate, and evidence-based interventions and escalation pathways. Renee is working toward her ultimate passion of maintaining high levels of job satisfaction across the nursing workforce and increased efficiency and effectiveness of nursing care throughout the community, using technology and digital health solutions to achieve this.

Elizabeth Crone is a cancer nurse researcher with the Academic Nursing Unit and the Department of Anaesthetics and Pain Management. Her project will implement routine, standardised collection of social determinants of health data for patients with cancer, using a digitally enabled solution. Elizabeth believes in the critical importance of health services research and implementation science as vehicles to examine and innovate health systems and health outcomes.

Belinda Lambros is a nurse practitioner with the Department of Infectious Diseases. She is co-leading the implementation of the precinct-wide adult sepsis pathway in the Electronic Medical Record EPIC, and has a key role monitoring all patients with sepsis at Peter Mac. Belinda’s project will establish a learning health systems framework to implement the clinical care standard, and optimise the implementation and uptake of the sepsis workflows at Peter Mac.

Associate Director of Health Services Research and Implementation Science at Peter Mac, Professor Karin Thursky, congratulates the new Fellows, "This fellowship program is a wonderful way to build a workforce that is skilled in introducing improved models of care using digital health that are evidence based, successful and sustainable."

"We look forward to supporting them and building our community of practice.'