Kate Curtis

Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District

Kate Curtis 

Professor Curtis’ work is underpinned by a philosophy of empowering staff and a desire to improve practice. Kate constantly endeavours to investigate and implement better ways to deliver care to emergency patients and to those caring for them. She has identified gaps and generated evidence to achieve change of national significance.
 
Kate’s research, commitment, collaboration, customer focus and leadership directly achieved;
  • 2018/19 Federal Budget commitment for a National Injury Prevention Strategy
  • Adoption of trauma nurse case management – resulting in the greatest improvements in care of severely injured patients in Australia and NZ over the past 10 years
  • Improvements to Ambulance ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø airway policy/equipment
  • Implementation of a trauma admitting service reducing death (by 8%) and bed days (700/year) for severely injured patients
  • A dedicated trauma support role for severely injured children and their parents
  • A validated new model that improve emergency nurse assessment under adoption across ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø and under consideration by the World Health Organization for integration in the global emergency care tool-kit
  • Independent Hospital Pricing Authority inclusion of URG classification weight applied to major trauma.
  • State-wide change to foam collars use in patients with suspected cervical spine injury, rather than using stiff neck collars which are associated with a large number of complications.
Further, each year Kate takes annual leave to lead a team of emergency nurses to deliver a train the trainer workshop in developing countries to build capacity in nurses to meet the unique challenges of assessing undifferentiated patients in the high risk emergency environment
​â¶Ä‹
Current as at: Thursday 29 August 2019
Contact page owner: ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Ministry of Health