Associate Professor Meredith Makeham from Macquarie’s Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research (CHSSR) has been appointed Chief Medical Adviser to the Australian Digital Health Agency, a Federal Government body responsible for all national digital health services and systems.

As a member of the Agency’s executive team, Associate Professor Makeham will provide advice in her areas of expertise, including patient safety, clinical governance, risk management, and digital health and safety research.

Meredith says she is looking forward to applying the best of Macquarie’s discoveries to her new role.

“This University has a proud tradition of scientific discovery, and it has been an honour to work with so many great researchers within the Australian Institute of Health Innovation,” she says.

“I’ll be leading the development of initiatives to ensure digital health services are designed, built and evaluated in partnership with the research community in Australia and internationally, and as part of that I look forward to staying engaged with our researchers here.”

The CHSSR Director, Professor Johanna Westbrook, says that Meredith will be greatly missed.

“Meredith has made a fantastic contribution to the Centre, building a program of research in primary care informatics,” Johanna says. “While her departure is sad news for AIHI, we look forward to working with Meredith in her exciting new role.”

Meredith’s research interest is in incident reporting and learning systems in primary care and general practice. She was a Chief Investigator of the NHMRC-funded Threats to Australian Patient Safety (TAPS) study, which examined the design and analysis of an anonymous electronic reporting system for errors in general practice.