Dr Dianne Willis
Highly Commended, Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence
College of Science and Medicine
Synopsis
As a Senior Lecturer and Academic Coordinator of Phase 2 Clinical Skills at ANU Medicine, Dianne leads the design, delivery and continual improvement of the Year 3 and 4 Clinical Skills curriculum. She strives to create safe yet challenging learning environments that foster reflective practice, lifelong learning and readiness for early clinical practice. Throughout her career, she has built strong, respectful relationships with students, ensuring they feel supported, challenged and empowered. As one final year student reflected: “Di, many thanks for the effort you put into your teaching. It not only makes us better doctors, it makes us better people!”.
Dianne has led several major curriculum innovations. In 2025, she redesigned the Year 3 program into a four-week Clinical Skills Intensive, enabling students to gain early competence in foundational procedural skills. She developed ‘Skills in Context’, an integrated clinical revision resource, and introduced hybrid patient assessments that evaluate both technical proficiency and communication, better preparing students for real clinical environments.
Within the simulation program, Dianne implemented structured written reflections to strengthen self-regulated learning, later evolving this into a notebook-based model in response to student feedback. This initiative has enhanced engagement and reflective capability which underpins safe, adaptive clinical care. Dianne has also led sector-shaping work in interprofessional simulation. Through sustained collaboration with the University of Canberra, interprofessional simulation expanded from a small pilot to a mandatory program across two universities and two states, demonstrating transformative impact on students’ understanding of teamwork, communication and collaborative practice.
Her contributions have been recognised through multiple institutional awards, including the Vice Chancellor’s Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning in 2021.
(Photo by Tangyao Zhang/Teaching Communities and Recognition team).