Bio: Carolyn Hullick, BMed, PhD, FACEM, a 2008-09 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice, is Clinical Director at the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and is associated with projects focused on aged care, transitions of care, and the appropriate use of anti-psychotics. She has recently led clinical care standards for sepsis identification and management. Dr Hullick is an Emergency Physician in Newcastle, New South Wales. She is a Harkness Senior Fellow, having spent 12 months at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York investigating care for older people in emergency departments. She was recently awarded her Ph.D. investigating this work. With expertise in geriatric emergency medicine, she has developed a program to support acutely unwell residents in residential aged care facilities and has geriatric emergency medicine leadership roles with the Australasian College and the International Federation for Emergency Medicine. She recognizes that vulnerable and complex older people need a health system which collaborates, communicates, and places people and their families at the center of care.
Placement: New York-Presbyterian Hospital
Mentors: Mark Lachs, M.D., M.P.H.
Project: Improving the Emergency Care Experience for the Elderly
Description: Hullick's aimed to identify and describe the spectrum of innovative interventions in emergency department care for older adults in hospitals across the U.S. She formed an expert panel to guide the project, define "innovation", and select target groups for interviewing. She then conducted interviews with physicians, geriatricians, nurses, social workers, and other providers, identified using snowball sampling, on innovations in providing emergency care for the elderly.