John Campbell Barrett Registrar Prize
The trustees of the J. Campbell Barrett Wellington Trust award a $500.00 prize for the best registrar audit project or review article in each hospital employment year. The entry needs to be an original work, and the applicant must be the primary author. The winning entry must be available to be published on the trust website. Each entry will be assessed by a judging panel consisting of at least one member of the CCDHB Anaesthetic Department and at least one member of the J. Campbell Barrett Wellington Anaesthesia Trust.
Submissions should be e-mailed to barrettanaesthesiatrust@gmail.com by close of business on December 13th.
To download an application form, please click below. Please note, that we will only accept applications that have been submitted online.
2026 Recipient: Marisa Schubert.
A healthcare improvement project to assess the provision of catheter-based regional analgesia for patients with hip fractures
Marisa Schubert’s project outlines an improvement project to address the timely provision of catheter-based regional analgesia for patients with hip fractures at Wellington Hospital. Surgery within 36 hours of injury is recommended to reduce complications and improve outcomes. The time between admission and surgery was greater than this for many hip fracture patients compared to other public hospitals in New Zealand. The project was designed to identify opportunities for service improvement. To do this Marisa identified the types of local anaesthetic pain relief patients received prior to their surgery (e.g. single or repeated injections or inserting a catheter that could be topped up if surgery was delayed), timeliness to providing pain relief, who provided pain relief (i.e. the experience of the anaesthetist), and where and when this this was performed.
This project identified opportunities for providing catheter insertion training to anaesthesia trainees and resourcing (space, equipment) within the Post-Anaesthesia Care Unit that could address several of these issues. The audit also identified the need to record and access times of topping-up catheters, as well as the effectiveness for addressing patients’ pain. While the project cannot speed up the process of surgery, it can address patient comfort and other outcomes. In terms of future work, implementing some of these ideas and measuring outcomes could be a justifiable implementation project