Look forward to an inspiring lineup of internationally recognised
speakers at our conference

Biographies for our presenters will be available here as soon as they are confirmed. Please check back here on a regular basis to read more about our conference speakers.

Mike Ardagh

Mike Ardagh, (ONZM, PhD, MBChB, DCH, FACEM), is Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Otago, Christchurch, Specialist in Emergency Medicine and Clinical Lead for Hospital HealthPathways at the Canterbury District Health Board, Christchurch, New Zealand. His PhD is in bioethics with a particular focus on the ethics associated with decision making during resuscitation.

Malcolm Battin

Malcolm Battin is a neonatologist at Auckland City Hospital. He has a long standing research interest in neonatal neurological injury, particularly neonatal encephalopathy (NE) in the term infant, and had served on the NE working group of the PMMRC since 2008.

Julie Considine

Professor Julie Considine Deakin University’s Professor of Nursing at Eastern Health, one of Victoria’s largest health services. Julie nationally and internationally recognised for her expertise in patient safety research and education. She has a particular interest in clinical decision making, predicting clinical deterioration, and nurses’ role in improving resuscitation outcomes. Julie has over 150 publications and has attracted over $5M in research and project funding. She is a Fellow of the College of Emergency Nursing Australasia and Australian College of Nursing. She is a Senior Editor of the Australasian Emergency Nursing Journal, represents the College of Emergency Nursing Australasia on the Australian Resuscitation Council, and is the Australia and New Zealand representative on the ILCOR* Basic Life Support TaskForce.
*International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation

Gerry Devlin

Gerry is the current Medical Director of the Heart Foundation and the Clinical leader of the New Zealand cardiac network. He is a Cardiologist and Honorary Associate Professor in Medicine with the Waikato Clinical school of the University of Auckland. Heart. Gerry is an experienced general cardiologist, with a special interest in the prevention and management of coronary artery disease, hypertension and heart failure.He is an experienced interventional cardiologist who completed his interventional fellowship in Torotono Canada. Gerry is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin Ireland and moved to New Zealand in 1988. He successfully completed his FRACP in 1995 and is also a Fellow of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand. He became a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology in 2012 and completed an MD thesis with the University of Auckland in 2013. Gerry is a busy clinical researcher with over 90 publications. Research interests include acute coronary syndromes, heart failure and systems of care.

Tracy Kidd

With a background critical care nursing, Tracy Kidd has provided nursing education in the tertiary and clinical setting since 1999. She completed a masters of nursing science focussing on the education needs of nurses working in rural urgent care services. Currently she works as a nurse educator throughout the Loddon Mallee Region in Victoria and has represented the Australian College of Nursing on the Australian Resuscitation Council since 2013.

Helen Liley

A/Prof Helen Liley is a neonatologist at in Brisbane, Australia. She is a member of the Neonatal Task Force of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation, and the Australian Resuscitation Council. She is an author of evidence-based guidelines including on neonatal resuscitation, ethics of research in children and paediatric and neonatal patient blood management. She collaborates with researchers in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland to study human factors in neonatal resuscitation.

Lindsay Mildenhall

Lindsay is a Consultant Neonatologist at Counties Manukau District Health Board, with research interests in Neonatal Echocardiography. He was an ILCOR Neonatal Resuscitation worksheet author for the 2010 review, and a Topic Co-Chair for the 2015 round. He is a co-author of the current NZRC NLS Course.

Kevin Nation

Kevin is the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Resuscitation Council (NZRC) and current Chair of the CORE Advanced Instructors of New Zealand. He has been involved with the NZRC for over 10 years, including setting strategic direction, general management of operations, and developing education and training programmes. Kevin's experience includes that of senior nurse in clinical cardiology and resuscitation educator at Waikato Clinical Campus. He is a co-opted member of the Australian Resuscitation Council, a past member of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation’s (ILCOR) Basic Life Support task force and currently is an ILCOR Domain Lead for airway and ventilation.

Gabrielle Nuthall

Gabrielle Nuthall is a Paediatric Intensivist who has worked as a specialist in the paediatric intensive care unit at Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, for the last fifteen years. Prior to her present position she completed fellowships in paediatric intensive care in Vancouver and Toronto, having completed her training as a paediatrician in Australia and New Zealand.

Gabrielle’s areas of interest are resuscitation, simulation, teaching and early warning scores. She is a founding member of the Starship Simulation Program, actively involved in the patient at risk team and deteriorating patient steering groups in Starship, an APLS instructor, a member of the New Zealand Resuscitation Council, on the Paediatric Task Force Committee of ILCOR.

Marcus Ong

A/Prof Marcus Ong is a Senior Consultant, Director of Research, and Clinician Scientist, at the Department of Emergency Medicine in Singapore General Hospital. He is also Head, Data Analytics, Health Services Research Center (HSRC), Singhealth Services; Associate Professor and Associate Director, Health Services and Systems Research (HSSR), Duke-NUS Medical School. A/Prof Ong also serves as Medical Director, Unit for Prehospital Emergency Care (UPEC) and Senior Consultant, Ministry of Health, Hospital Services Division. Finally he is Chairman, Pan Asian Resuscitation Outcomes Study (PAROS).

A/Prof Ong’s research studies focus predominantly on pre-hospital emergency care, medical devices, and health services research. His research has addressed issues such as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), improving ambulance deployment, acute myocardial infarction care and emergency care.

A/Prof Ong has obtained more than S$12 million in research grants for his studies, which include geospatial diseases mapping, clinical drug trials, resuscitation and cardiovascular sciences, pre-hospital emergency care, and biomedical engineering. He is the Principal Investigator for an international, multi-centre cohort study of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest across the Asia-Pacific. This clinical research network has published more than 36 articles in peer-reviewed journals since 2009. In total, A/Prof Ong has published more than 150 articles in international and local journals, such as Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Resuscitation, Annals of Emergency Medicine, etc.

A/Prof Ong has also patented inventions using Heart Rate Variability for risk prediction of acutely ill patients and cooling solutions for therapeutic hypothermia. The technology is currently being developed into bedside triage devices that can help in risk stratification of critically ill patients and he is Scientific Advisor for Global Healthcare, a start-up company providing medical cooling solutions.

Jasmeet Soar

Jasmeet Soar is consultant in intensive care medicine and anaesthesia at Southmead Hospital Bristol, UK. Jas is the current chair of the ILCOR ALS Task Force, Chair of the European Resuscitation Council ALS Working Group and an Editor for the journal Resuscitation.

He is a past Chair of the Resuscitation Council (UK), and chairs the ALS Course Subcommittee, and led the 2015 UK Guidelines process. He has an interest in ensuring we have guidelines that we can trust, are easy to use, and make a real difference to patient outcomes.

He has over 200 publications about resuscitation topics. Jas has had lead roles in the development of the iResus and Lifesaver apps.

Fiona Stewart

Fiona trained as a Cardiologist at Greenlane Hospital and as an Obstetric Physician at National Women’s Hospital. She has combined these two areas to develop a particular interest in maternal heart disease in pregnancy. She is active in Women’s Health promoting better diagnosis and management of women with heart disease. She has written an invited review in the Obstetric Medicine Journal and reviewed for the Obstetric Medicine Journal and the Internal Medicine Journal.

Dr. John McCarthy

Dr. John McCarthy is the Principal Technical Specialist for Geospatial Analysis at the Ministry of Health. After completing a PhD in Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds (UK) and a short stint as a Demographic Analyst in the private sector, John held a Postdoctoral Fellow role at the GeoHealth Laboratory (University of Canterbury) for nearly four years before moving to the Ministry of Health where he has been since February 2017.

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson is a Consultant Neurosurgeon and Pre-Hospital Care Specialist at Imperial College, London. He is Professor of Brain Injury and Hon Professor (the Gibson Chair) of Pre-Hospital Care at the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh. His specialist interests are traumatic and hypoxic brain injury, and the brain in extreme environments. He has worked extensively overseas and as an expedition doctor.

He is co-founder and medical director of GoodSAM (www.goodsamapp.org), an App and platform that alerts trained bystanders to cardiac arrests near them and has compiled the world's largest AED Registry. The system was originally built because of the hypoxic brain injury seen in his air ambulance work, usually related to trauma, but has since expanded into considerably more, especially cardiac arrest. The latest developments in video triage and assistance in clinical decision making, are set to radically change the way ambulance services can deliver care.

Dr. Jason Bendall

Dr Jason Bendall is an Australian specialist anaesthetist and prehospital & retrieval physician living and working in Newcastle Australia. Jason is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Paramedicine at Charles Sturt University and The University of Sunshine Coast. Jason is currently the Commissioner & Director for St John Ambulance New South Wales and is St John Ambulance Australia’s representative on the Australian Resuscitation Council and is Deputy Convenor of ANZCORs First Aid task force.

Tony Scott

Tony is a cardiologist and Clinical Director of Cardiology at Waitemata DHB in Auckland. He represents the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Cardiac Society on the NZRC. He is actively involved in the GoodSAM implementation project and chairs the Community Cardiac arrest working group of the Cardiac Clinical Network.

Mark Reynolds and Jackie Mailer

Mark Reynolds and Jackie Mailer are Nurse Educators in the Critical Care Department at Waikato Hospital. They both have extensive practice and knowledge in the Intensive Care setting.

Mark has been a Nurse Educator for over ten years and Jackie for the past two years. They will be presenting on CALS (Cardiac Surgery Advanced Life Support), a new (to NZ) resuscitation algorithm for patients who arrest post cardiac surgery and how this practice has been implemented into their mixed general/cardiac ICU at Waikato Hospital.

Dr. Bridget Dicker

Dr Bridget Dicker is the Head of Audit and Research for St John in New Zealand. Bridget has a PhD in Molecular Medicine and she is also an Operational Paramedic.

Bridget is the Principal Investigator for the St John out-of-hospital cardiac arrest registry. She is also an active member of the cardiac arrest outcomes working group that develops the strategies for improving survival from cardiac arrest for St John.

Tonia Nicholson

Tonia is an Emergency Physician and Co-Director of Training at Waikato Hospital at Waikato hospital in Hamilton. She is an examiner for the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, and an instructor of both ACLS and APLS. She is the current Honorary Secretary of the New Zealand Resuscitation Council (NZRC) and since 2010 has been a member of the ALS taskforce of ILCOR.

Professor Peter Thomas Morley

Professor, and Dean of Clinical School, Royal Melbourne Hospital, The University of Melbourne. Senior Specialist, Intensive Care Unit, and Director of Medical Governance at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Representative of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society on the Australian Resuscitation Council (ARC), and currently Chair of the ARC. Active involvement since 1998 in the development of the international evidence-based guidelines representing the Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation on the International Liaison Committee On Resuscitation since 2000, and Editorial Board member and Evidence Evaluation Expert for the AHA/ILCOR international consensus process for resuscitation science in 2005, 2010 and 2015. Member of the Continuous Evidence Evaluation Working Group (ILCOR).

Myra Wyckoff

Dr. Myra Wyckoff earned her engineering science degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She then came to UTSW Medical Center at Dallas for medical school and subsequently stayed for General Pediatrics training. She remained at UTSW for Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine training and worked under Phil Shaul, MD on a project which elucidated how plasma membrane estrogen receptors are coupled to eNOS production via G-protein signaling. Upon completion of sub-specialty training she joined the faculty of UTSW Pediatrics Department to become the director of Newborn Resuscitation Services at Parkland Memorial Hospital, a large, urban county hospital with over 12,000 deliveries annually. She developed and coordinates an educational rotation in newborn resuscitation for the senior pediatric house-officer, 2nd year emergency medicine residents, neonatal-perinatal medicine fellows and OB anesthesia fellows. In addition, she oversees the continued development of the high-risk neonatal resuscitation team. Dr. Wyckoff maintains and utilizes one of the most comprehensive neonatal resuscitation databases in the country to continually try to improve neonatal resuscitation processes locally and nationally. Prospective resuscitation protocols are studied in the delivery room and she has developed a neonatal piglet model of asphyxia-induced hypotension/bradycardia and asphyxia-induced asystole to better elucidate the hemodynamics and optimize resuscitation strategies during CPR in the controlled setting of the laboratory. She has served on the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation, Newborn Subsection since 2003 and is currently Chair of the Neonatal Task Force. She has served on the American Academy of Pediatrics Neonatal Resuscitation Program Steering (NRP) Committee since 2006 and recently completed 2 terms Co-chair. She currently serves as the ILCOR Science Liaison to the NRP Steering Committee. Since 2013 she has served as UTSW site PI for the NICHD Neonatal Research Network.

Tony Smith

Tony Smith is the Medical Director for St John Ambulance in New Zealand and he is an Intensive Care Medicine Specialist at Auckland City Hospital.

Tony chairs the working group that develops the Clinical Procedures and Guidelines for the ambulance sector in New Zealand and he oversees all of the clinical aspects of St John in New Zealand. He is a member of the New Zealand Resuscitation Council and the Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation. He has an active involvement in out-of-hospital research, with a focus on a collaborative approach to multicenter trials. He is a member of the HEMS team in Auckland and has an active role in out-of-hospital care.

Look forward to an inspiring lineup of internationally recognised speakers at our conference