Meet the Project Team

Professor Josephine Clayton is the Chair of the Advisory Group and the Project Director. She is a Palliative Care Physician working for HammondCare in Sydney; Professor of Palliative Care at the University of Sydney and Director of Palliative Care Research and Development, Hammond Innovations. She has extensive clinical experience in providing palliative care and discussing advance care planning with people with a variety of chronic and debilitating conditions. She leads a research program that aims to improve health professional/patient/family communication in order to enhance palliative and end-of-life care. She is currently contributing to various projects aimed at facilitating earlier consideration of advance care planning and/or palliative and supportive care. Josephine’s research has been published widely in leading international journals in palliative care and oncology, and translated widely into clinical practice. She has a strong interest in teaching communication skills relevant to the care of patients with life limiting illnesses.

Jon San Martin is a registered nurse with over a decade of experience in aged and palliative care. Driven by a passion for improving palliative care for older people, Jon focuses on building workforce capability and translating research into practice. He strongly advocates that palliative care and dementia care are core business in aged care. Starting as a care worker in home care and retirement villages, Jon progressed in his nursing career to residential aged care and then to specialist palliative care services. Jon has been involved in the implementation of various palliative care projects in aged care. He is currently working at Hammond Innovations as the Clinical Nurse Consultant for The Advance Project.

Dr Serra Ivynian is a Palliative Care Research fellow at HammondCare with an interest in patient-provider communication, health literacy, and coping with/adjusting to life with chronic life-limiting illness. She is a mixed-methods researcher with over 8 years’ experience on various national government-funded initiatives to help improve palliative care service delivery across Australia, with a focus on supporting carers of people with life-limiting illness (including bereaved carers). Her experience includes co-design, implementation science, evaluation, user-centred design and transdisciplinary approaches in palliative, ageing and aged care research. Her research has been published in several multi-disciplinary Q1 journals and in the areas of palliative care, dementia, cardiovascular care, and nursing. She is a research affiliate at the Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney, and an adjunct fellow at Improving Palliative, Aged and Chronic Care through Clinical Research and Translation (IMPACCT), Faculty of Health University of Technology Sydney.

Professor Jennifer Tieman is a Matthew Flinders Fellow in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. As Director and Research Lead for two national palliative care resources, CareSearch and PalliAGED she is responsible for ensuring palliative care evidence is available for health professionals, aged care workers and people and families affected by the need for palliative care. The CareSearch project team undertakes research on knowledge retrieval and knowledge dissemination and investigates approaches that encourage the use of evidence in health, particularly in palliative care and end of life care. Jennifer is part of the consortium team delivering the ELDAC project. She is also research lead of a specialist research team, Flinders Filters, which is building the evidence around bibliometric retrieval and use.