I've spent twenty years on the systems side of healthcare.

I began my career in health answering the phone to practice managers.

In 2006 I joined AGPAL — the Australian General Practice Accreditation Limited, the body that accredits Australian general practices against the RACGP Standards. I built an e-learning package used by 7,000 GP surgeries, and I spent a year on the other end of the line from practice managers and clinicians trying to get an accreditation system to do what they needed it to do.

Twenty years later I have written a book for those same people. Everything in between — the hospitals, the statewide programs, the national interoperability work — was me learning how the system above them actually functions, and why so little of it ever reaches the practice down the road.

How I got here

About ten years ago I was at a crossroads. You could call it a crisis. I had a young family, and I'd chosen the role I was in because it was secure. Then the role was made redundant, and I walked out of a steady job for the last time.

I want to be precise about that, because the framing matters to me. The role was made redundant. I was not. People are never redundant. Roles come and go; the person doing the role remains a person with everything they've already learned still intact. It's a distinction I've carried since, and it shapes how I work with every team I've led.

Walking out of that building, I decided I wanted the upside of my own efforts — to be recognised for the value I delivered rather than the role I happened to occupy. So I built my own thing. Independent. My name on the door. Everything on this site grew out of that decision.

I'm not a clinician.

I say that early, because the credibility of everything else depends on it being clear. I'm not the person to tell a physiotherapist how to assess a shoulder, a GP how to manage a complex case, or a psychologist how to sit with someone in distress. That work is yours, and the people I've most respected across my career have been the clinicians whose hands and judgement and presence I've watched make a difference to another human being.

What I am is someone who has spent two decades building the operational infrastructure that surrounds clinical work. I've led electronic medical record implementations in Australian hospitals. I've sat beside clinicians designing the change journey for a thousand-bed hospital, and led the team that delivered electronic medications management across it to improve patient safety. I've coordinated a statewide emergency number rollout across 132 hospitals — a change that, done well, saves minutes when minutes matter. I've built and run digital health programs in Africa and across Australia.

And I've been a patient. I've sat in waiting rooms not knowing what would happen next. I've watched people I love be cared for by clinicians and nurses whose hearts, in those moments, were extraordinary. The palliative care of my mother is one of the experiences I kept returning to while writing the book. The nurses who walked beside our family in that period taught me something about clinical work that no project ever could.

The gap between what clinicians want to do and what the systems let them do — that gap is my whole career.

Where I've done it

• Australian Digital Health Agency — Program Manager, Interoperability. Established the program and drove the national five-year Interoperability Plan from 20% to 80% complete, across federal and state government, healthcare identifiers and My Health Record conformance.
• Ramsay Health Care — Senior Project Manager, and acting Program Director for two months. Ran the $30.5M procurement phase of the electronic health record program — designing the RFP, authoring the evaluation plan, and leading two evaluation streams with twenty C-level stakeholders — that will roll out across 72 sites.
• eHealth NSW — Single Digital Patient Record. Built the evaluation architecture for a statewide program: six working groups, 350 clinical and operational representatives, delivered on schedule through two years of fully remote COVID conditions.
• NSW Health — Program Manager, Electronic Medical Records at Sydney Local Health District. Four digital health projects, 5,000+ staff trained, electronic medications management delivered with a commendation.
• NSW Health — emergency standardisation across 17 local health districts and 132 public hospital sites. On time and under budget.
• VP Health, Lesotho — Program Director. Established the country office, delivered donor-funded EMR projects in public hospitals, and built a cadetship program with the public health department so the investment would outlast the funding.
• AGPAL / QIP — Technical Consultant. Built the e-learning package for 7,000 GP surgeries and supported their clinical end users through Australia's general practice accreditation system.

Certified: Prince2 Practitioner · AgilePM · Certified Scrum Master · Benefits Management

Worked extensively in PMBOK, ITIL and ADKAR environments.

Graduate Diploma in IT Management · Graduate Certificate in Business · BSc (Ecology) · BA (Politics)

The Independent Clinician's Toolkit (2026) and Perspective Upgrade: A New Paradigm for Project Management (2019). Previously hosted the High Performance IT Project Management Podcast.

I came to healthcare sideways — a science degree in ecology and a politics degree, then accreditation software in Brisbane, project delivery in London, hospitals in Lesotho, and eventually home to Sydney. I've never stopped being interested in how systems behave when the people inside them are under pressure. It turns out that's the same question whether you're studying an ecosystem or a hospital.