CJ Cabilan - Queensland Advancing Clinical Research Fellowship recipient

Queensland researcher, CJ Cabilan is a traveller at heart aiming to spend the first sunrise of each year in a new and exciting location. In 2020, CJ was awarded a Queensland Advancing Clinical Research Fellowship grant to explore the development, implementation, and the effectiveness of a digital occupational violence risk assessment tool (aptly named as the Queensland Occupational Violence Patient Risk Assessment Tool or QOVPRAO) in emergency departments (ED). It’s important research like this that will see the sun set on occupational violence in our EDs.

Occupational violence describes the violence that hospital staff face every day from patients, and/or their friends and relatives. This violence is very common — it might be abusive language or physical assault.

“When occupational violence occurs, nobody wins. It is damaging to patients, staff, and the hospital.”

“Early detection of occupational violence can reduce its incidence and severity and enable timely implementation of staff and patient supports.”

CJ and her team at the Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) will use the Fellowship to develop, implement and evaluate the QOVPRAO (pronounced kwov-pro), for use in some Queensland EDs and potentially, around Australia and the world. QOVPRAO helps ED staff identify patients who are likely to be violent and trigger a set of appropriate interventions aimed at defusing the violence before it erupts.

The PAH, Australia’s first fully digital hospital, is the perfect test site given its use of integrated electronic medical records. Researchers can build an alert warning directly into moderate and high-risk patients’ charts. With this, staff will be able to detect and manage potentially violent patients earlier and more appropriately to ensure our EDs remain safe for everyone.

Everyone deserves a safe workplace and we look forward to our hospital staff being able to care for their patients without the daily risk of violence.

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CJ Cabilan is a clinical research officer in the Princess Alexandra Hospital Emergency Department. Her research interest is diverse as a consequence of being curious, innovative and collaborative. She has over 30 publications in various aspects of health care. Her current work focusses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of an occupational violence risk assessment tool in the emergency department.

The Queensland Advancing Clinical Research Fellowships (CRF) program delivers on a key commitment by Queensland Health in the Queensland Advancing Health Research 2026 Strategy, “to design, develop and fund new fellowships programs with a clear focus on translation into clinical practice and improved health outcomes”. Open to Queensland Health doctors, nurses, dentists, allied health practitioners and clinical scientists, the program recognises that clinician researchers are uniquely placed to identify clinical issues that can benefit from further research, lead patient focussed research discoveries and facilitate improved patient care through research translation.