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Justine Oates
Clinical Nurse Consultant
Justine graduated in 1989 completing her Diploma of Applied Science in Nursing and then went on to receive her Bachelor of Nursing in 1996 at Sydney University. She commenced her nursing employment at RPAH on a gastrointestinal surgical ward in 1990. She then travelled overseas and worked in London for a year before commencing employment on the head and neck surgical ward at RPAH in 1993.
Her role has been as a Clinical Nurse Specialist for the past 9 years and more recently as Clinical Nurse Consultant/Head and Neck Case Manager. Justine has established the pre-admission clinic allowing pre-operative assessment, education and discharge planning. Another of Justine's roles within the Institute is to coordinate the multi-disciplinary head and neck clinic where patients are introduced to all the clinical staff and are given detailed information about their illness and advised of their treatment options. Justine is currently researching quality of life activities of patients before, during and after treatment. She is also actively involved in staff education and the implementation of clinical pathways.
Sarah Davies
Clinical Nurse Educator
Sarah qualified in
Nottingham, England, in 1985 as a Registered Nurse.
She started working on the head and neck ward at Royal
Prince Alfred Hospital in 1992 and became a clinical nurse
specialist in 1995. She then spent two years as the
New Graduate Clinical Nurse Educator for the hospital,
responsible for the supervision and education of 100 new
graduate nurses each year. Sarah has a special
interest in education and has been the Clinical Nurse
Educator for Head and Neck since 2004.
Merran Findlay
Senior Oncology
Dietitian
Merran is the Senior Oncology Dietitian at Royal Prince
Alfred Hospital, specialising in providing nutritional
care to patients with head and neck cancer. She
graduated with a Master of Science (Nutrition &
Dietetics) from the University of Wollongong in 1999 and
is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian with more than 10
years oncology nutrition experience. Merran has become
known in the field through a successful international
sabbatical to centres of excellence in the USA, Canada
and the UK. More recently, she was the chief
investigator developing the first national
evidence-based guidelines for the nutritional management
of patients with head and neck cancer. These guidelines
have been endorsed by the dietetics associations of
Australia, New Zealand and Britain. Merran is an active
contributor to the University of Sydney dietetics
learning program, a reference committee member for
Cancer Institute NSW and Chairperson of the Dietitians
Association of Australia Oncology Interest Group (NSW).
Katrina Blyth
Senior Speech Pathologist
Katrina made a career change from registered nurse
to Speech Pathologist in 2001 and started working at
RPA in 2005. After working in the area of voice
disorders in the UK, she returned to RPA in 2008.
Clinically, Katrina specialises in assessment and
management of voice disorders and runs a fortnightly
voice clinic with ENT. She also specialises in
assessment and management of swallowing and
communication disorders for patients with head and
neck cancer. Professionally, Katrina is training in
nasendoscopy to undertake swallow assessment and
therapy. She was awarded the Beard and Segelov
travelling fellowship in 2011 to undertake this
training. Academically, Katrina has commenced a PhD
through the University of Sydney focusing on use of
visual biofeedback in speech and swallowing therapy
following tongue surgery.
Nham Tran
Postdoctoral Scientist
Nham is working with us as a postdoctoral scientist. He received his PhD from the University of New South Wales in the area of molecular biology and gene therapy. Previous to this he has been associated with breast cancer research at the Millennium Institute at Westmead hospital. Nham has also worked for pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson and Johnson Research in developing novel gene expression system. His role at the centre will be to investigate novel markers for head and neck cancers.
Kan Gao
Data Manager/Analyst
Kan Gao originally qualified as an Assistant Engineer in Shanghai, China in 1985 and travelled to Australia in 1989. He began working with Central Sydney Area Health Service from 1990. In 1996 Kan started working with the data management team at BreastScreen (NSW) and was appointed as the Quality Assurance Officer in 1998. During this time he began to study Application Programming at the Sydney Institute of Technology and graduated in 1999. Kan joined the Institute in 2002.
Kan is actively involved in a number of Head and Neck research projects with Surgeons and Research Scientists. These research articles have been accepted by major medical journals for publication. Kan is also actively involved in data collection, database updates, quality assurance of data, patient follow-up, database maintenance, production of reports and presentation for audit and clinical research.
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