Meet Kaye Hewson, SPHERE’s new Lead, Clinical Innovation Strategy
SPHERE is delighted to welcome Kaye Hewson as our new Lead, Clinical Innovation Strategy.
Kaye brings extensive experience in clinical care, health system innovation, public health program leadership and large-scale research translation. But at the heart of her career is something much simpler: a lifelong commitment to improving care for patients, communities and the clinicians who support them.
Early career
Kaye always wanted to be a nurse. Growing up in the UK, Florence Nightingale was her hero, and that early inspiration eventually led her to train at the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. It also helped shape a career grounded in care, advocacy and a belief that health systems should work better for the people who rely on them.
Arriving after arriving in Australia, Kaye worked as a critical care nurse. That clinical foundation has stayed with her throughout her career, even as her work moved from the bedside into broader system change.
From bedside care to systems focus
Moving to Queensland, Kaye began working on projects focused on new models of care, workforce design and the systems needed to better support clinicians and patients. She became increasingly interested in the factors that shape a patient’s experience of care, including discharge, length of stay and the way services are organised around clinical teams.
This led to a significant statewide project examining the Nurse Unit Manager role across Queensland. Kaye authored a comprehensive report with recommendations to strengthen its leadership and management function, recognising the important role Nurse Unit Managers play in supporting staff, improving patient flow and maintaining high-quality care.
It was the beginning of a career-long focus on turning evidence into practical change.
Shaping change where it matters
Kaye describes herself as someone who takes vision and helps turn it into reality. Not the day-to-day operational end of implementation, but the early, critical stage where systems need to shift, problems need to be understood, and the right solutions need to be shaped.
For Kaye, that means listening carefully to patients, communities and clinicians, identifying the problem, diagnosing what needs to change, finding possible solutions and translating evidence into clinical practice to achieve the best outcomes.
That approach has guided her work across major statewide and national health initiatives, including Queensland’s Health Technology Assessment Program, the Integrated Care Innovation Fund and other programs focused on strengthening care in the community.
Most recently, Kaye led the Australian Teletrial Program, a national MRFF-funded initiative designed to build clinical trial infrastructure in regional, rural and remote Australia. As the program’s Primary Investigator, she led the national office and oversaw the strategy, governance and administration of a $75.2 million grant, working across five states and the Northern Territory.
Under her leadership, 284 clinical trial sites participated in regional, rural and remote areas enabling more than 2,000 participants in regional communities to access 200 clinical trials and delivering education to more than 5,000 health professionals. For Kaye, the program demonstrated success because the health infrastructure is designed around the needs of patients and communities and required working together across borders and health services, universities and industry.
“Teletrials showed what can be achieved when we build that infrastructure around patients, so people in regional, rural and remote communities have fairer access to research and new treatments,” Kaye says.
Kaye also credits her Master of Public Health with broadening her view of health systems and deepening her understanding of policy, population health and equity.
“It opened my world whilst giving me perspective on how the health of a nation is so interrelated, on the political, social and cultural, economic, and environmental fabric of our society.”
That broader perspective is one of the reasons she was drawn to SPHERE. Kaye says she was attracted by SPHERE’s focus on translating research into real-world practice, as well as its commitment to communities where equity and access are central concerns.
“We need to accelerate how we translate research into clinical practice through collaboration, our partnerships and using the Lived Experience of our patients for timely access to health care and ensuring their quality of life. We are living longer but not necessarily well,” she says.
In many ways, Kaye’s new role brings her career full circle. From a young nurse inspired by Florence Nightingale to a health system leader focused on innovation, equity and translation, her work has always been driven by the same purpose: making care better for the people who need it.
We are delighted to welcome Kaye to SPHERE and look forward to the contribution she will make in advancing clinical innovation and research translation across the partnership.