Professor Gillian Caughey (BSc Hons, PhD) is a pharmacoepidemiologist with research interests in quality and safety of care in aged care, medicines safety and utilisation focused on the older population with multimorbidity and polypharmacy. She is the Associate Director at the Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA), South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute and Adjunct Professor at University of South Australia. Her current work focuses on the aged care population using ROSA, a unique large linked data-platform of over 3.2 million Australians accessing aged care services. This work is focused on monitoring and evaluating the quality and safety of aged care services provided to older Australians, to improve their overall health and wellbeing. Prior to this she was Director of Research at Clinical Pharmacology, Royal Adelaide Hospital (Adelaide University). Her research to date, has a strong translational focus on improving health outcomes for the older population and is internationally recognised for her work focused on medicines safety and utilisation in older people with multimorbidity and polypharmacy.

• Multimorbidity
• Polypharmacy
• Pharmacoepidemiology
• Aged Care
• Geriatrics

Dr. Caughey has made significant contributions to aged care quality improvement. She co-led the expansion of Australia's National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program, recommending quality indicators for home care and workforce, set to be implemented by 2025. Her work on multidisciplinary models in residential aged care has improved care delivery by integrating allied health professionals. Additionally, she has contributed to developing tools to measure quality of life and consumer satisfaction, with her recommendations being adopted for national use in 2022.

Her funding highlights include securing a $2.99M MRFF grant (2024-2028) to establish a national data platform in aged care, and a $2.89M NHMRC Investigator Grant (2024-2028) to harness real-world data for improving care. Other highlights include $1.49M for establishing the PHARMA-Care program (2023-2026) and multiple grants supporting aged care quality measurement, Indigenous aged care policy, and stroke care. She has also received over $3M in funding for dementia and medication safety research, alongside numerous smaller project grants.

PhD supervision of  early recognition and management of transient ischaemic attack and stroke (2011-2014), with the thesis awarded the UniSA Division of Health Sciences Postgraduate Thesis Prize (2015). The student also secured two prestigious NHMRC Post-Doctoral Fellowships (EL1 2018-2022, EL2 2022-2026).

PhDs (co-supervision): 

• 2017-2021: Multidisciplinary Care Models in Multimorbidity. Resulted in 5 publications. 
• 2016-2020: Multimorbidity, polypharmacy, and high-risk patients for adverse medicine events. Resulted in 5 publications. 
• 2013-2017: Prescribing indicators and quality use of medicines in residential aged care. Resulted in 5 publications.
• 2011-2014: Early recognition and management of transient ischaemic attack and ischaemic stroke. Resulted in 5 publications.