Det Supt John DeCandia

John is a Detective Superintendent with the South Australia Police (SAPOL) and has provided 22 years of service to SAPOL.  He is currently the Officer in Charge of the Crime Gangs Task Force.

John was appointed to the rank of Inspector in January 2005 and has a wide range of experience within SAPOL having worked in a variety of areas, including uniform duties at Christies Beach, Henley Beach and Port Pirie.  He has spent the majority of his time in SAPOL within investigative areas, such as the National Crime Authority, Adelaide CIB, Drug and Organised Crime and Holden Hill CIB. 

As an Officer of Police he has worked as the State Duty Officer, Anti-Corruption Branch, Crime and Intelligence Faculty and the Operations Manager at both the Drug Investigation and Organised Crime Investigation Branch’s and as the Officer in Charge, Operations Section at Elizabeth Local Service Area. 

John has a Bachelor of Management from UniSA, a Graduate Certificate in Business Administration and a Master of Business Administration.

Roz Donnellan – Fernandez

Roz is a registered Midwife and Lactation Consultant. Most recently she was Women's & Children's Hospital Foundation Midwifery Fellow 2008 - 2011.

She is qualified in general and mental health nursing and holds academic status in the the School of Nursing & Midwifery where she undertakes teaching and curriculum development in the discipline of midwifery. She believes the status and health of women is integrally linked to strengthening cultural, educational, professional practice, legislative and industrial frameworks for midwifery that enable choice, safety and equity in maternity services delivery.

Roz is a national Director with Australian Nursing & Midwifery Accreditation Council and Australian College of Midwives nominee to the Standing Advisory Committee for Health Professions, Health Workforce Australia. She is an accredited member of national Midwifery Practice Review and maintains clinical caseload practice.

She has recent experience in leading public sector systems change to implement and expand midwifery caseload models and long term engagement with professional, community and government initiatives to enhance practice, policy and relationships that improve childbearing options and outcomes.

Dr Stefan Mazur

Stefan is the Operations Lead Consultant and Prehospital and Retrieval Physician with MedSTAR and an Emergency Medicine Consultant at Royal Adelaide Hospital.  He has previously worked in Wellington, Perth, Auckland, Birmingham, Sydney and Townsville.  Stefan has recently returned from London where he was working for London HEMS in PreHospital trauma care. 

Damien McInerny Clin Psych

Damien has worked as a Clinical Psychologist at The Migrant Health Service in Adelaide for the last 8 years, providing psychological assessments and therapeutic interventions to newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

He has been actively involved in the migration cases of many asylum seekers, providing psychological reports and as expert witness at many migration case tribunals: DIAC hearings, Refugee Review Tribunals and Ministerial intervention appeals

He has spoken at many forums in Australia and in London on the impact of detention on asylum seekers’ psychological health, the politics of asylum and social justice and has a keen interest in these issues. He continues to be a strong advocate for the welfare and rights of asylum seekers and refugees in Australia.

Dr Peter Bautz

Dr Peter Bautz is a South African Trauma Surgeon, and former director of the Groote Schuur Hospital Trauma Unit (GSHTU), Cape Town South Africa. South African trauma surgeons are expert in the management of abdominal, thoracic, vascular, neck and other injuries.

The workload at GSHTU averaged 400 stabs / month, 110 gunshot injuries / month, 40 trauma laparotomies / month, plus an active trauma laparoscopic and thoracoscopic service often initiated in the resuscitation rooms. He developed the Emergency Room Thoracotomy protocol in South Africa which is now accepted as part of the DSTC course.
He was recruited as the trauma surgeon at the King Faisal Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1999, where he managed many victims of blast injuries from Al Qaeda attacks in Riyadh.
Dr Bautz moved to Australia in January 2005 accompanied by his obstetrician wife and children and became the Head of Surgical Trauma in addition to his role as an emergency and general surgeon at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. He has a particular interest in penetrating trauma, damage control surgery, abdominal sepsis, and is actively involved in surgical and operative trauma training. He has been actively involved in DSTC over the last 8 years, and is also an ATLS Director.
Dr Bautz is also a general surgeon, with an interest in the management of severe abdominal sepsis, and laparoscopic surgery.

Dr Jane Edwards

Dr Edwards is a Consultant Forensic Pediatrician for the WCH Child Protection Unit. Her role is to conduct forensic medical assessments of children referred by Police or Families SA where there has been a concern notified that the child may have been harmed as a result of physical abuse, sexual abuse/assault or neglect. The purpose of these forensic assessments is to document injury or abnormal findings, assess injury mechanisms, identify occult injury and then provide an opinion about whether the injury may have been inflicted or whether it has been adequately explained. Therefore the forensic assessment provides police with medical information that assists them in their decision making about criminal charges and the prosecution of offences and provides Families SA with medical information to assist them in assessing the child’s safety or otherwise and need for protection. Her role therefore involves much interagency discussion, consultation, teaching and training in addition to the conducting of medical assessments.

Professor Russell Gruen

Professor Russell Gruen MBBS PhD FRACS is a specialist trauma surgeon expert in resuscitation of severely injured patients, haemorrhage control and massive transfusion. He is also Director of the National Trauma Research Institute where his role includes fostering dialogue between researchers and the community, facilitating multicentre trials and observational studies, and ensuring that knowledge generated from research translates into practice and policy improvement. He is an NHMRC Practitioner Fellow (2012-2016) and Professor of Surgery and Public Health at Monash University. He has 20 years’ postgraduate experience in research spanning a range of clinical, health service and knowledge translation topics related to trauma, surgery and emergency services.
Professor Gruen trained in trauma surgery and surgical critical care at Harborview Medical Centre in Seattle, one of the leading academic trauma centres in North America. He has since been an active clinician (>50%) at Australia’s two largest trauma centres (Royal Melbourne Hospital 2006-2009, and The Alfred 2009 to present).
Professor Gruen has over 90 peer reviewed publications, including several first author publications in The Lancet, JAMA, and Annals of Surgery, 39 as first author, with over 800 citations. He has received research funding totalling more than $13 million, is CIA of a 5-year program grant on knowledge translation in traumatic brain injury that includes a national cluster randomised trial of an intervention to improve its management in the emergency department, and has recently received over $3 million from the Transport Accident Commission to create a Centre for Excellence in Traumatic Brain Injury Research, and a program in Neurotrauma Knowledge Translation and Practice Improvement.

Val Smyth

Val is currently the Director of Emergency Management Unit (EMU) with the Department of Health in South Australia which includes disaster preparedness planning and coordination. While health is the SA Hazard Leader for Human Disease (which includes Pandemic Influenza, food borne disease and drinking water contamination) the work of the Emergency Management also includes a broad all hazards approach to disaster preparedness thereby encompassing preparedness planning for the health aspects of earthquake, mass casualty events, flood, fire and CBRN incidents. EMU also coordinates business continuity planning, risk assessment and trauma.

Val has many years of experience within the health industry much of this in acute areas of nursing and holds qualifications in adult and paediatric nursing, emergency and disaster management, adult education and nursing management.  She has held senior positions in nursing, education and management both in Australia and the United Kingdom in hospital emergency departments, neonatal and paediatric surgery, infection control, adult intensive and coronary care, clinical nurse education and the SA Department of Health including emergency management.

Following her migration to Australia with her family in 1989 Val worked for 10 years at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide where for much of that time, she held the position of Nursing Unit Head of the Paediatric Emergency Department.

Since 1999 Val has been working in the Department of Health and until taking up her current position her portfolio areas included Management of the Tissue Retention Response Process for South Australia, Redesigning Patient Care (utilizing lean thinking systems), hospital and systems reviews and strategic planning.  

Val is an experienced presenter both within Australia and overseas.

Associate Professor Julie Considine

Julie is the Director of the Deakin University-Northern Health Clinical Partnership where she combines her skills in nursing practice, education and research. Julie’s research aims to improve patient safety by optimising clinical decision-making, increasing use of research evidence in practice, and ensuring effective models of service delivery.

She leads internationally recognised research programs in Clinical Risk Management and Workforce Development and Service Delivery Models. Julie is a member of the Nursing Executive at Northern Health, Deputy Editor of the Australasian Emergency Nursing Journal, represents the College of Emergency Nursing Australasia on the Australian Resuscitation Council where she is also the Basic Life Support Convenor, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing, Australia.

Dr Renée Petrilli

For over 10 years, Dr Renée Petrilli has worked extensively on human performance and safety issues in high-risk industries particularly in aviation and medicine.

Specifically her research relates to the adaptive responses and decision-making of experts and teams under stress, sleep physiology, and the impact of fatigue on operational performance and non-technical skills.

An important aspect of Dr Petrilli’s doctoral research was a landmark study investigating the impact of international duty patterns on the operational performance of B747-400 flight crew during safety-critical events.

Additionally, Dr Petrilli has been involved in high-fidelity simulator-based studies involving decision-making and performance of junior anaesthetists under stress.

Jack McLean

Jack is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Centre for Automotive Safety Research at the University of Adelaide where he was Director for 34 years.
An engineer with a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Harvard University, he is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. His research areas include crash injury biomechanics, with a particular interest in head injury.

Dr Daniel Sheridan

Dr Daniel Sheridan is an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore MD and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Flinders University School of Nursing & Midwifery. At Johns Hopkins, Professor Sheridan has developed forensic focused coursework and programs of study within the Master’s and Doctoral programs. He is co-course creator and coordinator of a soon to be released Fundamentals of Forensic Health Care: An Online Short course offered through Flinders Uni in partnership with Johns Hopkins. Dr. Sheridan has been an active member of the Emergency Nurses Association since 1983 and is a former President of the International Association of Forensic Nurses. He is on the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. Dr. Sheridan has created and managed two hospital emergency department-based family violence intervention programs, the first in Chicago, Illinois and the second in Portland, Oregon. Professor Sheridan is nationally certified in the United States as a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner and maintains a clinical practice providing specialized forensic nursing care to patients victimized by sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and elder and vulnerable person abuse and neglect. Dr. Sheridan has published more than 30 clinical and research articles on abuse and forensics and has given over 600 invited lectures on these topics nationally and internationally.