Tuesday April 22, 2025

The Barwon Health and Deakin University Clinician Scientist Pathway is a jointly funded four year PhD scholarship program for Barwon Health employees across medicine, nursing, midwifery and allied health. It is also open to Barwon Health scientists or health professionals working alongside clinicians in a BH Clinical Directorate to support safe and effective patient care.

The Clinician Scientist Pathway supports employees to maintain their roles at up to 0.5 FTE with protected PhD research time, blending patient care with research.

Barwon Health and Deakin University are delighted to announce that Simone Fitzgerald has been awarded a Clinician Scientist Pathway PhD Scholarship. As a well-regarded clinician at Barwon Health with a passion for using research evidence to improve patient care and outcomes, Simone is ideally suited to the Clinician Scientist Pathway.

 

Simone Fitzgerald, Nurse and Research Coordinator, Intensive Care Unit, Barwon Health

Project: Investigating the feasibility and value of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) scribes in ICU settings.

An experienced Nurse with a Master of Nursing Practice and Master of Public Health, Simone Fitzgerald is currently Research Coordinator for the Barwon Health Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Simone has a research interest in digital health solutions, a significant area of growth and development as healthcare becomes more integrated and connected.

Current evidence reports an average of 1300 data points that need to be documented for each patient in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) each day, which is up to 10 times more data per patient than in other hospital settings. As an ICU Nurse, Simone has seen first-hand the unique and significant challenges for ICU clinical staff in completing this documentation while providing direct care and communication to patients and their families.

AI scribe technology captures speech via a microphone and then converts spoken conversation into clinical notes in the patient’s health record. The use of AI scribes could reduce documentation burden on clinical staff, increase time providing direct care, improve the quality and accuracy of documentation, and increase clinician and consumer satisfaction. There is little, if any, high quality research examining integration of AI scribes into ICU settings.

To address this gap in evidence, Simone’s Clinical Scientist Pathway PhD research will:

  • explore and describe what is known about the use of AI scribes in critical care, and across health care in general,
  • identify the enablers, barriers, unintended consequences, and situations where AI scribes could be most effectively used, and
  • evaluate the use of AI scribes in clinical practice in ICU through a pilot feasibility trial.

Simone’s PhD project will be supervised by Associate Professor Neil Orford, Senior ICU Specialist and Director of ICU Research at Barwon Health and Deakin Distinguished Professor Alison Hutchinson, Chair in Nursing at Barwon Health and Co-Director of the Centre for Quality and Patient Safety Research.

To find out more about the Clinician Scientist Pathway, please click here.