Dr Judy Lowthian was appointed the Principal Research Fellow at the RSL Care + Royal District Nursing Service Research Institute in late 2016, following the completion of her NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (Investigating rising demand for emergency health care with an ageing population).

She also holds a 0.2 EFT appointment as a Senior Research Fellow within the Pre-hospital, Emergency & Trauma Unit and an honorary appointment with Alfred Health.

Her research is underpinned by a clinical background in speech pathology rehabilitation and health service management in Australia and the UK. Her specific interest is health services research designed to improve the quality and safety of patient care.

Areas of published scholarship include: epidemiological and intervention studies in pre-hospital and emergency care, evaluation studies of primary care and acute hospital programs, and medication safety in older patients.

In the past five years, Dr Lowthian has been the recipient of numerous competitive grants and prizes/awards. One of her doctoral thesis manuscripts “The challenges of population ageing: accelerating demand for emergency ambulance services by older patients, 1995–2015”, was awarded the AMA (Vic) Sir Richard Stawell Memorial Prize, for an article “on a medical subject of clinical significance” published in the Medical Journal of Australia. She serves on national and international committees that focus on improving geriatric emergency care.