Physiotherapist commitment to graduates recognised Royal North Shore Hospital senior physiotherapist Leisl Davis has been named the recipient of this year’s Perrot-Follet Award.
This annual award recognises individuals who have made an exceptional contribution to the Physiotherapy First Year Graduate Program at their hospital. Liesl was nominated in acknowledgement of her outstanding leadership, education, and support of new graduate physiotherapists within intensive care patients, particularly her commitment to guiding graduates during evening shifts.
Her dedication to fostering clinical confidence, skill development, and professional growth in early career physiotherapists has made a significant and RNSH collaborations help advance clinical AI tools Leisl Davis
Research shaped during Dr Yagiz Aksoy’s residency at Royal North Shore Hospital is now helping advance new clinical decision-support tools designed to improve personalised cancer care. Yagiz secured more than $400,000 through the Australian Government’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) Ignite program to further develop PanaceAI, a clinical decision-support platform integrating a series of validated predictive models. With industry and university co-investment, the total value of the PanaceAI initiative is nearly $1 million. Several of the predictive models being integrated into PanaceAI are already available to clinicians. One example is a malignant colorectal polyp risk calculator, a validated tool designed to support treatment decisions. The calculator evaluates polyps, which are small growths that can develop on the lining of organs such as the bowel, and helps doctors assess whether major bowel surgery may be required after removal of a cancerous polyp. Yagiz said the tool will soon operate under the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) clinical decision support software exemption, meaning it is designed to support, not replace, clinician judgement. “Clinicians enter the patient’s data, review the personalised risk estimate and make the final treatment decision,” he said. “It is designed to support clinical judgement, not replace it in any form.” The research underpinning these models has been published in peer-reviewed
international journals and developed in collaboration with RNSH clinicians, including Professor Anthony Gill and Associate Professor Angela Chou from anatomical pathology, along with multi-institutional collaborators. The new funding will support integration of the standalone tools into a unified secure platform, followed by prospective validation across hospital sites. The work complements Yagiz’s leadership role in the $2.25 million Research Ethics Plus AI project, funded through the National Health and Medical Research Council Partnership Projects scheme, which is developing Australia’s first national guidance for ethical AI governance in healthcare. “AI holds enormous promise, but it must be rigorous, transparent and responsibly governed,” he said. PanaceAI is currently progressing through validation and regulatory preparation prior to broader implementation.
Dr Yagiz Aksoy
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NSLHDNEWS | ISSUE 4| 13 MARCH 2026
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