A/Professor Pauline Calleja - Nursing and Midwifery Research Fellowship recipient

While many of us shy away from needles, A/Prof Pauline Calleja is surrounded by them! When she’s not indulging in her passion of sewing, she’s getting to the pointy end of medical research and focusing her attention on improving the outcomes of intravenous (IV) catheters for sick Queensland kids. A/Prof Calleja has been awarded a $119,943 Nursing and Midwifery Research Fellowship from Queensland Health, in partnership with the Queensland Board of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, to fund her research.

When IVs stop working, the medication meant to be delivered into the bloodstream pools into the tissue. This is known as an extravasation injury - a serious and common cause of patient harm, especially common in paediatrics. An effective way to reduce these injuries is to ensure that the right IV is inserted at the beginning of treatment. A/Prof Calleja’s interdisciplinary team will optimise and implement the newly released Michigan Appropriateness Guide for Intravenous Catheters in paediatrics (miniMAGIC), across rural, remote and metropolitan sites to improve safe IV selection and thereby reduce extravasations.

“Obtaining successful IV access can be difficult in paediatrics” said A/Prof Calleja. “Reducing IV complications, such as extravasations, can really impact on a patient’s experience in hospital.”

“By focusing on making improvements to care in regional, rural and remote locations, we may be able to reduce the number of children and their families being transferred to specialist/metropolitan hospitals due to complications and ensure they can continue their treatment close to home”.

“A big challenge for researchers is access to funding, now that I have secured this Queensland Health grant, I’m excited to use this opportunity to support clinical staff to solve problems and help improve healthcare for regional, rural and remote Queenslanders”.

A/Prof Calleja’s team aims to complete this exciting new research within 2 years.

A/Prof Pauline Calleja is the Associate Dean Nursing, and Head of College-Nursing and Midwifery in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Sciences at CQUniversity in Cairns, Australia. Pauline is also the research priority lead for Health Workforce in the School. Her clinical specialty is emergency nursing and rural and remote practice. Pauline’s research expertise includes mixed methods and qualitative design projects that encompass clinical intervention, practice improvement, teaching and learning in clinical and simulation environments. Her research focus is to improve rural and remote communities’ local access to high quality healthcare.

The Nursing and Midwifery Research Fellowships (NMRF) program is a partnership between Queensland Health and the Queensland Board of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, supporting nurses and midwives to improve health outcomes for Queenslanders through research that:

• enhances the value of the professions through discipline specific research
• promotes innovative healthcare through evidence-based nursing and midwifery practice and new models of care, and
• contributes to the advancement of nursing and midwifery policy and education.