Katrina is currently Director, Practice Support and Quality Section, Primary Care Division at the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. Her responsibilities include management of the Practice Incentives Program which aims to support general practices to deliver quality care, enhance capacity and improve access and outcomes for patients. Prior to commencing her doctoral studies, Katrina’s roles included helping patients with rare, life-threatening conditions to access effective treatments; improving the sustainability of future PBS drug supply via pricing reviews; increasing patient access to new and expanded pharmacy programs and protecting public health through the scheduling of medicines and poisons. Prior to joining the department in 2010, Katrina worked on clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies both nationally and internationally.

Katrina’s thesis proposed a novel policy framework specifically designed to incentivise evidence generation, application submission and revenue generation to encourage the evaluation of off-patent repositioned medicines by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). It has the potential to improve affordable patient access to safe and effective off-patent repositioned medicines in Australia and improve the quality use of medicines and alignment with broader National Medicines Policy (NMP) objectives.

Background: Australia's NMP aims to ensure medicines meet agreed standards of quality, safety and efficacy. This is achieved when a prescription medicine is evaluated by the TGA to ensure benefits outweigh risks prior to approval. The use of a prescription medicine beyond approved limits is known as off-label use. Medicines prescribed off-label for different health conditions, usually due to a lack of effective approved treatments, are known as repositioned medicines. 

Supervisor: Associate Professor Anna Olsen

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