Robyn Clay-Williams

Dr Robyn Clay-Williams leads a research stream in human factors and resilient healthcare. She currently holds a NSW Health EMC research fellowship in the field of health service and system design. Prior to her work in health services research, she was a military test pilot, an electronics engineer, and flight instructor.  Dr Clay-Williams transitioned to healthcare seven years ago through a PhD, which in internationally recognised work, translated aviation teamwork concepts to healthcare via a randomised controlled trial evaluating a Crew Resource Management based training intervention. She has produced over 80 peer-reviewed research outputs.  Specific areas of interest include teams and teamwork, decision-making, leadership, simulation, resilience engineering, and usability test and evaluation of medical devices and IT systems. 

Key projects in which she is currently involved:

• Investigating methods for improving productive safety in hospital Emergency Departments.
• Deepening Our Understanding of Quality in Healthcare (DUQuA). A large, multifaceted NHMRC-funded project assessing the relationship between quality management systems and patient outcomes for AMI, stroke and hip fracture in 32 hospitals across Australia (all states territories except WA).
• Development and implementation of a tool to identify innovation in surgery (Westmead Hospital and Macquarie University Hospital.
• Development and implementation of a surgical decision making process to improve outcomes for frail patients. The new process involves pre-surgical consultation/discussion between patients, families, surgeons, intensivists, and anaesthetists (Townsville Hospital and Health Service).