Professor Andrea Driscoll MACN wins 2026 Nursing Trailblazers Award

Australia’s Minister for Health and Ageing Mark Butler has named Deakin Distinguished Professor Andrea Driscoll MACN as the 2026 recipient of the Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers. Chair in Nursing at Monash Health leading the Centre for Quality and Patient Safety Strategic Research, Monash Health Partnership in collaboration with Deakin University, Driscoll is also a senior nurse practitioner.

Driscoll has been recognised for her ‘Nurse Practitioner Models for High-Risk Heart Failure Populations’ initiative: an integrated, nurse practitioner-led model delivering specialist heart failure care across inpatient, outpatient and virtual settings.

Designed especially for people with complex, high-risk heart failure in rural and regional areas and to close gaps in continuity of care and specialist access, the models have reduced preventable hospital readmissions and ED presentations, improved uptake of guideline-directed therapies and generated significant cost savings, the Australian College of Nursing (ACN) said.

“The approach has been replicated across multiple hospitals and has influenced heart failure policy and practice at state and national levels,” ACN added. The other two finalists for the 2026 award are Catherine Baring MACN and Sigrid Pitkin MACN. “These finalists show the potential of nurses to design better ways of delivering care,” said Adjunct Professor Kathryn Zeitz FACN, ACN Chief Executive Officer, about all three finalists for the award.

Last year’s winner was Professor Michelle Barakat-Johnson in relation to the RPA Virtual Hospital Wound Care Command Centre — a pioneering service that connects clinicians (including aged-care workers) directly with wound care specialists, no matter where they are. You can read about the command centre, in Barakat-Johnson’s words, here.

Image credit: iStock.com/Jacob Wackerhausen