Anne Creaton

Dr Anne Creaton is a Teaching Specialist, Clinical Skills Coordinator (Year 4) and Academic Advisor (Year 5) in Medicine at James Cook University, Cairns. Anne also works as an Emergency Physician and Senior Consultant in Aeromedical Retrieval with the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

She has over twenty years’ experience leading education, assessment, and system development in emergency, retrieval, and global health across rural, remote, and low‑resource settings. Internationally, she has established and sustained postgraduate Emergency Medicine training in the Pacific at Fiji National University and continues regional capacity‑building in a visiting specialist capacity, through coaching and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

Anne has undertaken consultancy work and held advisory roles with the World Health Organization since 2015, including current membership of the WHO Technical Advisory Group for Integrated Clinical Care. https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/public-notice---comment--who-technical-advisory-group-on-integrated-clinical-care

Anne's scholarly contributions are applied, policy‑relevant, capacity‑building, and are intertwined with teaching and service. Her article in the New England Journal of Medicine is used as a reference for courses at Sydney University and Monash University. The field‑defining textbook (Oxford Handbook of Retrieval Medicine) is used as a reference text at JCU.  She coauthored regional consensus research shaping emergency care standards for the Pacific Region, for which she was awarded the ACEM Global Emergency Care Award in 2021, including infographics that have used for advocacy and to inform policy.

Anne currently leads the Theatre in Medical Education Project (TiME) which commenced in 2026 and represents an innovative, co‑designed approach to improving equity and student performance in OSCEs. The project applies acting techniques and focused communication training to the preparation for clinical encounters and OSCEs, recognising these encounters as complex performances rather than purely cognitive tasks. Activities are deliberately aligned with OSCE criteria such as rapport‑building, information gathering, structure, empathy, and clarity under time pressure. A strong emphasis is placed on psychological safety, ensuring that learning environments normalise vulnerability and mirror best practice in simulation‑based medical education. TiME is being developed through iterative cycles of delivery, reflection, and refinement, with structured feedback from students and facilitators informing ongoing improvement. Evaluation strategies are embedded from the outset to assess impact on student confidence, perceived performance in clinical encounters, hurdles and OSCE experience, with an explicit consent process in place for the use of deidentified data in future scholarship.

Anne is an examiner for the Associateship in Pre‑hospital and Retrieval Medicine for Australia and New Zealand, a multi-college initiative (ACCRM, RACGP, ACEM, ANZCA, and CICM) and writes, reviews, and standardises assessment material, contributing to the integrity, fairness, and consistency of an international high‑stakes postgraduate assessment.