Clinical leads

Dr Carl Horsley is the clinical lead for system safety at the Commission. He is a dual-trained intensivist currently working in Middlemore Hospital, Auckland. He has a research interest in the use of simulation to build system resilience, the sociology of safety and the intersection of te ao Māori and modern safety science.

Carl recently completed his MSc in Human Factors and System Safety at Lund University, Sweden, with a thesis examining the way in which the current safety norm has been formed and stabilised. He is also an active member of the Resilient Healthcare Network, a collaboration of safety scientists, researchers and clinicians exploring the implications of resilience engineering in health care. Carl is particularly interested in how to embed these ideas in everyday practice and has authored several book chapters on aspects of this work.

Kat Quick is the clinical lead for the trauma rehabilitation project. She is a physiotherapist, having completed her training at the University of West England Bristol in 2004. Kat has been in New Zealand since 2012 and worked at Auckland District Health Board from October 2012 until August 2017. In her previous clinical lead and advanced practitioner roles, she has led multiple and complex service improvement projects and completed the DHB’s performance improvement green belt training. Kat is a current member of Physiotherapy New Zealand and the New Zealand Medical Advisory Board for Guillain-Barré Syndrome and currently practices in Dunedin providing rehabilitation for people following traumatic injury.

PhD Candidate Nurse Practitioner, MN(hons)

Julie has been a New Zealand Registered Nurse for 23 years and a Nurse Practitioner (NP) for six years. She gained her Master of Nursing at University of Auckland (UoA) and is currently in the provisional year of her doctoral study. Her research focuses on the development of a system to support nurses to identify acute deterioration in people living in residential aged care (RAC).

She has held roles in rural hospital nursing, district nursing, nurse education and chronic care management. In 2008 Julie focused solely on older adults becoming the first Waikato District Health Board (DHB) employed Gerontology Nurse Specialist dedicated to supporting nurses work in RAC. She used this platform to successfully challenge for NP (older adults) registration in 2015. She is currently a professional teaching fellow at UoA.

She has been recognised for her academic, clinical, and leadership contribution to nursing. She was presented with the UoA Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences Denis Pickup Clinical Educator Award in 2017, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation national “Services to Nursing” award in 2015 for her “contribution to gerontology nursing at a local and national level” (Marion Guy Present NZNO) and Waikato DHB awards for quality improvement initiatives including the introduction of the SBARR communication tool and the development of a best practice guideline for management of Scabies in residential aged care. 

Following a year of working with the Commission in a deputised role she now holds the clinical lead position for the RAC quality improvement activity.