Distinguished ProfessorTracy Levett-Jones

Despite attempts to address the human and systems factors that lead to unsafe healthcare, adverse events remain the third leading cause of death in high resource countries and cost $AU1.2 billion annually. My research is informed by the understanding that the knowledge and skills that healthcare students develop during their undergraduate studies have a direct and long-lasting impact on patient safety. This led to my internationally renowned program of research examining the impact of educational interventions on patient outcomes. Selected examples of my research include a focus on clinical reasoning skills, patient safety, empathy, and planetary health:
More than 60% of clinical errors are attributed to poor clinical reasoning skills. My clinical reasoning research includes a series of funded projects that led to the development of an evidence based clinical reasoning model that is used in nursing, allied health, and medical curricula across Australia and internationally, including Harvard and Stanford medical programs. This research also resulted in a number of highly cited journal articles, multiple invited speaker presentations, and a textbook titled ‘Clinical reasoning: Learning to think like a nurse’. It is a required text in more than 20 universities.

In Australia, the absence of a clearly articulated set of patient safety competency statements has been a challenge to curriculum development, teaching, and student assessment. To address this gap, I led a Delphi study to design and validate a patient safety competency framework. This research also resulted in a set of evidence-based, interactive, online patient safety teaching and learning resources and assessment tools. To date, over 150,000 students from more than 30 universities have engaged with these activities. These resources and the evidence-based competency statements are now integral to nursing curricula across Australia and New Zealand, resulting in measurable improvements in students’ patient safety knowledge. As well as a number of publications, these projects let to a 2021 VC citation.

More than 200 studies demonstrate the impact of empathic practice on peoples physiological and psychosocial health outcomes. However, it has been identified the healthcare students’ empathy levels can decline by up to 50% during the period of enrolment in an undergraduate degree. In 2017, I established the Empathy Initiative research group with the aim of generating a body of rigorous research that informs and influences graduates' and clinicians’ empathy skills. The outcomes of this program of funded research include publications, keynote presentations, workshops, development of a Virtual Empathy Museum and biannual empathy symposia. The psychometrically validated instruments developed as a component of this research have been used in a number of international studies and the empathy resources have been adopted by multiple Australian and international universities. The Empathy Initiative research group was awarded a Dean’s Excellence award in 2019, a VC citation in 2022, and a AAUT citation in 2023. Additionally, our empathy research conducted with healthcare professionals and marginalised groups, has transformed clinical practice in settings such as refugee services, spinal and stroke units.

The World Health Organization states that climate change is the most pressing issue facing humanity today. I established and lead the Planetary Health Collaborative. My recent body of research (see (https://planetaryhealthcare.com.au/) focuses on the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution evidence. This research has resulted in more than 20 publications, blogs, an interactive website, games, simulations and enrolment of 8 HDR students. We have been commissioned to develop planetary health position statements for the Council of Deans and the Australian College of Nursing.  These initiatives are influencing curriculum integration across Australia.