Celebrating Australia’s 2025 Nursing Trailblazers

Celebrating the 2025 Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers

When Professor Michelle Barakat-Johnson was announced as the winner of the 2025 Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers, it marked a recognition that nursing can not only respond to change, but lead it. In a forum of policy makers, clinicians and nursing leaders, Minister for Health and Ageing Mark Butler named Barakat-Johnson’s innovation the benchmark for how nurse-led thinking can reshape care delivery.

Nursing work can often be described as incremental: the steady accumulation of best practices, refining processes, championing patient-centred care. But occasionally, a disruptive idea demands the industry to rethink not only how we deliver care, but who drives that change. The Award thrusts Professor Barakat-Johnson’s RPA Virtual Wound Care Command Centre into the national spotlight, while also shining a light on a generation of nursing trailblazers working at the edges of possibility.

Innovation at the system level

Since its inception in 2019, the Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers has been Australia’s only national award dedicated solely to nurses who are transforming health and aged care systems through leadership and innovation. Administered by the Australian College of Nursing (ACN), the Award celebrates nurse-led solutions that are evidence-based, scalable, and responsive to health system pressures. In announcing the 2025 finalists, ACN CEO Kathryn Zeitz emphasised that this Award is about more than individual acclaim, it is a platform to share models that can be replicated. 

Past winners and finalists illustrate the breadth of innovation in nursing. Previous winners and projects have spanned mental health recovery camps, strategies to reduce needle phobia, street health services targeted at vulnerable populations, virtual hospital-in-the-home models, and embedding palliative care in residential aged care settings. 

These projects are now woven into parts of Australia’s health fabric; proof that the Award purpose is fulfilled not by recognition alone, but by sustainable change. The 2025 Award is the sixth iteration, and the calibre of submissions this year was especially high, according to Zeitz. The runners-up, Kaitlyn Cook and Dr Andrea Taylor, were also singled out for their creativity and leadership. 

Professor Barakat-Johnson’s journey

Michelle Barakat-Johnson holds the title of Professor of Wound Care and Skin Integrity at the University of Sydney and works within Sydney Local Health District. From the outset, her approach has blended the clinical depth of wound care with foresight into digital, remote, and integrated models of care.

At the heart of her work is the RPA Virtual Wound Care Command Centre, launched in 2023 via the Royal Prince Alfred Virtual Hospital, Australia’s first hybrid specialist wound care model. The concept is elegantly simple yet technologically ambitious: centralising specialist nursing expertise in a hub that supports remote wound imaging (leveraging AI), virtual consultations, continuous monitoring, and seamless collaboration among nurses, patients, carers, GPs and specialists. 

Her earlier work evaluated the feasibility and acceptability of that model: in a trial, 51 patients with chronic wounds were managed through the Virtual Wound Care Command Centre, with a median healing time of 66 days. All patients expressed high satisfaction, with 86.4 % recommending the service, and 84.1 % finding the app easy to use. That study, presented in MEDINFO 2023, helped prove that a hybrid digital-nurse hub is not just a vision, but a viable model in Australia. 

More recently, a cost-consequence analysis (published in 2025) confirmed the model’s ability to deliver efficiencies and better outcomes as it scales. In addition, Barakat-Johnson and her team secured an NHMRC Partnership Project grant of $1.5 million to further test, evaluate and disseminate a “Digital Model of Wound Care” nationally. 

The results in practice have been profound. In aged care settings, the virtual hub allows clinicians to rapidly triage wound deterioration, reducing unnecessary hospital transfers and emergency department visits. Within community care, wait times for specialist wound assessments have shortened, access has expanded to regional and remote populations, and patient satisfaction is consistently high.  It is a system-level intervention with direct bedside impact.

What the win means for health systems and patients

The importance of this Award extends beyond the individual accolade. It underscores the strategic value of nurse-led innovation in confronting some of Australia’s most intractable healthcare problems.

Consider chronic wounds. This hidden epidemic is estimated to affect over 450,000 Australians, with a public health cost exceeding $6.6 billion. Yet wound care often suffers from invisibility, fragmentation, long waits, and inequitable access. Barakat-Johnson’s command centre is a practical, real-world remedy to those issues.

For nursing in Australia, the Award also reaffirms that nurses hold a vital role as innovators, strategists, and system architects. The ACN celebration of this model helps raise its visibility, encouraging translation, adaptation, and scaling across jurisdictions.

For health systems, this Award models what truly integrated, digitally augmented care can look like. We know that Australia faces escalating demand on hospitals, ageing populations, workforce shortages and rising chronic disease. Solutions like the Virtual Wound Care Command Centre offer a blueprint for shifting care upstream, keeping patients at home, reducing avoidable hospital burden, and optimising specialist resources.

Building on this momentum

While the Award marks an important milestone, it should be seen as a springboard for nursing. The real challenge lies in translating innovation into everyday practice across diverse health settings, embedding it in policy, securing sustainable funding, and empowering the nursing workforce to continue leading transformative change.

For this vision to endure, models like Professor Barakat-Johnson’s must be replicated thoughtfully rather than copied wholesale. Each region will need to adapt the approach to suit its infrastructure, workforce capacity, digital connectivity, and community needs. Local pilot programs, backed by ongoing evaluation, will be crucial to ensuring long-term success. Equally important is embedding nurse-led digital care within health policy and funding frameworks so these projects become enduring components of the system, not isolated initiatives. Alignment with Medicare, state health budgets, telehealth incentives, and digital health strategies will determine whether innovations like the Virtual Wound Care Command Centre can scale nationwide. This applies long term thinking to the Award’s purpose, which is exactly what the ACN wants to ensure is considered.

Congratulations, Professor Barakat-Johnson, as well as this year’s commendations.