Cowra's Danielle Allen is one of the 112 Australians who received a prestigious Churchill Fellowship, at a ceremony at Government House, last week.
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The Churchill Fellowship recognises people with passion and drive, and provides an unrivalled opportunity and freedom for people to engage with the world's best practice on issues that matter to Australian communities.
Ms Allen has more than 20 years' experience working as a Social Worker within both rural and metropolitan hospitals.
She now specialises in the area of domestic and family violence.
Her most recent work has been in the area of attempted strangulation during domestic violence.
"I believe when services work well together, more support can be provided to victims of domestic violence who have experienced attempted strangulation and more intimate partner homicides can be prevented," Ms Allen said.
"Attempted strangulation is medically very dangerous with unseen injuries and a risk of stroke that more are unaware of.
"It is also a predictor of dying, increasing a victim's chance of being murdered by their violent partner by 700%," Ms Allen said.
As part of the Fellowship, Ms Allen will be travelling to the USA and Canada to learn from sector leaders about the best practice strategies needed to ensure services work collaboratively to improve outcomes for victims.
Ms Allen has recently co-led an award winning project at the Orange Health Service, improving the Emergency Department responses to domestic violence victims who have experienced attempted strangulation.
The learnings from this work are currently being shared across NSW Health Services.
A patient resource called the S.O.S card developed in conjunction with the project has been translated into 21 languages and reproduced for use by Health, Police, Ambulance and other services in NSW, Queensland an the ACT.
Ms Allen is dedicated to pursuing opportunities to improve service response to those most at risk in our communities.
"My goal for the Fellowship is to bring back innovative strategies to work with agencies in co-designing a health information campaign about the risks of strangulation and implement best practice principles to improve collaboration between services," Ms Allen said.
