Professor Imogen Mitchell
Alerting students to critical care issues, most notably patient deterioration in medical emergencies, is the foundation around which my teaching philosophy revolves. I take complex medical concepts and transform them into accessible and practical building blocks of knowledge that can be easily used by newly graduated doctors. This eases their transition from medical students into safe, confident practising junior doctors, something that has far-reaching benefits for both patients and the community at large.
My scholarly activities in the area of clinical care date back to my time as an intern, when I encountered a lack of practical teaching clinical knowledge and addressed this by writing a handbook for fellow and future interns. Later, as an intensive care specialist, I built a unique spiral curriculum at the ANU Medical School that focusses on understanding and managing a common, yet life threatening clinical scenario, acute patient deterioration. More recently, I have led the development of COMPASS, the multi award-winning inter-professional, multimedia patient deterioration education package. This package is undertaken by all year 4 ANU Medical students prior to graduation, and has been adopted by all eight Australian teaching jurisdictions, as well as by healthcare organisations worldwide in Ireland, Oman, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
In recognition of the work that I have undertaken in informing national and international health policy, I was awarded the prestigious and competitive Harkness Scholarship for Health Policy and Practice for 2013/14. This scholarship runs for 12 months, is being undertaken at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States, and involves conducting original research and working with leading US health policy experts. Closer to home, I was awarded a 2014 ANU Vice-Chancellor's Special Commendation for Teaching Excellence for my outstanding teaching across the Medical Sciences Program. My work in successfully instigating a review of the ANU Medical School Curriculum in 2012 and aligning it with a newly-released Australian Medical Council (AMC) Graduate Outcomes was also recognised with an award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning by the ANU Colleges of Science in 2013
