The COQI Program Team

Professor Lintzeris is the Clinical Lead and Chief Investigator of the COQI project. He is a practicing clinician (addiction medicine specialist), Director of Drug and Alcohol Services, South East Sydney Local Health District and Conjoint Professor in the Specialty of Addiction Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney. He is the current President of the Chapter of Addiction Medicine, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, past Chief Addiction Medicine Specialist for NSW Health, and Foundation Chair of the NSW Drug and Alcohol Clinical Research and Improvement Network (DACRIN).     

Professor Lintzeris has a keen interest in clinical and translational research in the drug and alcohol field, with 200 peer review journal publications. A key interest is the development of outcome frameworks in our sector, particularly the use of clinical information routinely collected in electronic record systems – enabling innovative and responsive approaches to research and evaluation, and the basis for better value health care for people with substance use disorders.

Kristie Mammen is the Program Manager for the COQI Program.  She is a registered psychologist with 20 years experience in the Drug and Alcohol Sector.  During that time she has project managed a number of state-wide and cross jurisdictional clinical research and evaluation projects such as an evaluation of the introduction of Buprenorphine-Naloxone in Australia.

In her work as the COQI Program Manager for the past 8 years, she has been instrumental in the adaptation and implementation of the ATOP and the development of the NSW Clinical Care Standards for AoD Treatment. She is committed to the aims of the COQI program – to support AoD services to access and use routinely collected clinical information to evaluate the outcomes of their treatment programs and support the delivery of treatment that is safe, high quality, and has good “health value”.

Jennifer Holmes is currently employed in the role of Senior Program Manager, Data and Informatics with the New South Wales Ministry of Health, Centre for Alcohol and other Drugs. Jennifer was the clinical informatics advisor / senior project officer for the NSW Ministry of Health Drug and Alcohol Information Systems Project in 2012-2013 and the NSW eHealth Community Health and Outpatient Care (CHOC) electronic medical record implementation for Drug and Alcohol services from 2013-2017.

Information management and the use of clinical data to inform practice is a passion of Jennifer’s and she holds a Masters of Health Informatics from Sydney University. Jennifer was a member of the group of service manager and clinicians who developed and implemented a brief clinical monitoring tool the Australian Treatment Outcome Profile (ATOP) for drug and alcohol treatment services and is now a member of the Clinical Outcome and Quality Indicator (COQI) Project team, which is developing core clinical standards and outcome metrics for NSW Drug and Alcohol treatment services who are using the CHOC eMR.

Jennifer is a Registered Nurse with over 30 years’ experience in the Drug and Alcohol treatment field including Drugs in Pregnancy, the management of several opiate treatment services, the Langton Centre a large drug and alcohol treatment and research facility in Surry Hills, Sydney and the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross.

Jennifer is past President, past Chairperson of the Credentialing Advisory Committee and current Public Officer for the Drug and Alcohol Nurses of Australasia (DANA). She has been awarded life membership of DANA and Hepatitis C NSW.

Annie is a Nurse/Midwife, with  a BA in Social Science/Communication and over 25 years’ experience in health. She is the Nurse Educator for the COQI project, leading the development of the Competency Based Workforce Development Package which will support treatment services to implement the Clinical Care Standards for AoD Treatment.

Annie has experience working in drug and alcohol, primary health and infectious diseases in a range of roles including clinically, as a project manager, in policy development, and adult education. Most recently, in her role as the Senior Nurse Manager in SESLHD Drug and Alcohol Services, Annie played a critical role in establishing the Consumer Participation Program, the Ngalaiya Wellbeing Program and helping to roll out the Take Home Naloxone Program in NSW.

She is inspired by organisations and people that are committed to progressing the role of consumers and continual quality improvement in health care.

She hasn’t got any hidden talents or hobbies, but she does love people, dogs, dancing, summer and having fun so I guess that’s something…..

Dr Rachel Deacon is a Research Associate with the SESLHD Drug and Alcohol Services Clinical Research and Evaluation team, and the Discipline of Addiction Medicine within the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD in Astronomy in 2006, and found her way into drug and alcohol research through positions first with the Kirby Institute then the University of Sydney.

Rachel works with teams across SESLHD and other LHDs to implement the COQI framework and manage data collection and outputs. She also supports clinical research and evaluation projects, such as the effects of COVID-19 on drug and alcohol treatment service provision. Rachel also co-runs the bi-annual SWASH survey of important health issues relevant to lesbian, bisexual, queer and other non-heterosexual identifying women engaged with Sydney’s LGBTQ communities.

Emma has worked in public health research since 2002, including over a decade in drug and alcohol research and four years in perinatal mental health research. She has successfully managed a variety of research projects over that time, including a study using electronic medical records to describe client characteristics at entry to treatment (with a particular focus on methamphetamine use), two drug trends monitoring studies, a review of prison drug strategies, an exploration of what consumers understand about hepatitis C, development of an ‘aberrant’ opioid behaviour scale, co-editing a monograph on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), and a data linkage study looking at alcohol use in pregnancy. She has co-ordinated a large project investigating the acceptability, efficiency and costs associated with two models of perinatal psychosocial assessment and referral at a large tertiary maternity hospital, and a cohort study of pregnant women, their partners and infants looking at the impact of substance use in pregnancy on child and family outcomes. She has also provided manualised telephone counselling to people quitting tobacco smoking, manualised CBT treatment to people quitting dependent cannabis use, co-ordinated the development of drug and alcohol fact sheets for young people and assisted in recruitment on a range of other studies including the NSP survey, a study investigating demand for contraceptive services at drug and alcohol outpatient services, and a large alcohol treatment project. Before arriving in Australia and becoming a researcher and project officer, she was a client support worker at an outpatient substance use treatment centre in Cardiff, Wales.

Dr Llewellyn Mills is an early career researcher specialising in clinical addiction research, based at the Langton Centre in Surry Hills. He received his PhD in experimental psychology in February 2018 and since then has worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the Discipline of Addiction Medicine, University of Sydney and for South Eastern Sydney Local Health District Drug and Alcohol services.

Llew’s expertise is in data science and statistical methods. He is currently the statistical consultant for the Drug and Alcohol Clinical Research and Improvement Network, an organisation comprised of clinical drug and alcohol researchers from around Australia, offering advice on sample size calculations, statistical analysis and experimental design.

Llew has worked on many projects at the Langton centre, including (i) coordinating and leading data analysis on an NHMRC-funded, multisite, randomised controlled clinical trial testing the efficacy and safety of a THC:CBD drug, nabiximols, for treating cannabis dependence, (ii) coordinating and analysing data for an online survey recording the experiences of medical cannabis users in Australia.  For the COQI project Llew has been involved in finding ways to use routinely collected clinical outcomes data to answer research questions of real practical importance to drug and alcohol clinicians. For example for the MAData project Llew examined whether using methamphetamines as well as heroin at treatment entry had an influence on clients’ response to methadone or buprenorphine treatment over time.  

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