Nicole Heneka with her award at the OPCC Gala Dinner
Congratulations to Nicole Heneka on being awarded the Palliative Care Australia's National Palliative Care Award 2019 in the category of Individual Award - Emerging Researcher. This award recognises outstanding contribution to palliative care by a researcher in the first five years of their research.
The award was announced at the Palliative Care Awards Gala Dinner at the Oceanic Palliative Care Conference (OPCC) on Thursday 12 September at the Perth Exhibition Centre.
Nicole said, 'The greatest thing about this award is that it acknowledges how strong palliative care research is in Australia, New Zealand and around the world. I'm proud to be a part of that community.'
Nicole has been an IMPACCT palliative care research coordinator since 2015 in which time she has undertaken a large doctoral research project while working across multiple palliative care research projects.
Her doctoral research project entitled Perceptions, impact and scope of medication errors with opioids in specialist palliative care inpatient services (the PERISCOPE Project) is the first of its kind to identify that, while serious patient harm due to opioid error is exceedingly rare in palliative care, half of all palliative inpatients exposed to an opioid error experience iatrogenic harms.
Nicole's research also identified the existence of a positive safety culture in specialist palliative care inpatient services that encourages and supports error reporting and facilitates organisational learning to minimise and prevent errors.
As an outcome of this research, Nicole devised a series of recommendations to help inpatient palliative care services minimise opioid errors. Her research has provided valuable insights into a little-known area and highlighted current strengths and opportunities to increase the quality and safety for palliative care inpatients.
This is not Nicole's first award. On the back of her preliminary doctoral work, Nicole was awarded the prestigious Clinical Excellence Commission - Ian O'Rourke Scholarship in Patient Safety. The scholarship enabled her to travel to the US to complete the Practitioner in Residence Program at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) in Philadelphia.
While in the US, she worked with internationally renowned patient safety experts to refine the final phase of her doctoral project and presented her findings at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in Baltimore. Nicole has presented the findings of her doctoral research of over 20 national and international conferences and eleven organisations.
Nicole said 'I am committed to improving the quality and safety of care provided to palliative inpatients and intend to continue to pursue research in this area.'
Watch the 2019 National Palliative Care Awards Winners Video to hear directly from Nicole and others what the Palliative Care Australia awards mean to them.