When Ann Marie Kilpatrick started her Master’s in Healthcare Leadership in April 2000, it was her first time in formal education for almost 25 years. It is no wonder, then, that she was nervous when she sat down to get the result of her first assignment. As it loaded on screen, Ann Marie was disappointed to see a D. It was her two sons who explained that she hadn’t scored poorly; in fact, she had achieved a Distinction. “After that, I got right into it and got very competitive about my results,” she laughs.
The qualification from Australia’s Southern Cross University capped Ann Marie’s vast experience in paediatric nursing and set her up for the next phase of her career. “It taught me a lot, different aspects of leadership that have been useful in challenging situations,” she says.
Growing up in Ballycastle in Co Antrim in Northern Ireland, Ann Marie always wanted to be a paediatric nurse. “My mum always said that, from a very young age, I talked about wanting to look after children,” she says. However, she could never have foreseen the route that would take her to her current role as Director of Clinical Operations, Specialist Consulting and Health Information at Monash Health, the largest public health provider in the state of Victoria.
After her secondary education, Ann Marie applied for nursing courses in both Northern Ireland and Scotland, where her closest school friend had gone to university. After a couple of trips to visit her in Edinburgh, Ann Marie decided to move over there while she tried to get into nursing.
Just weeks before the planned move, there was a call from the school of nursing at the University of Dundee: could Ann Marie be there the following Tuesday for an interview? “I changed all my plans and left Northern Ireland with two big bags of belongings on the Sunday boat,” she says. The interview was a success and she started her three-year nursing studies the next week.
Throughout those years, she was dating Geoff, a fellow Northern Ireland native who was studying actuarial mathematics and statistics in Edinburgh. “He’s Protestant and I’m Catholic, so we knew we wouldn’t go back to Northern Ireland and work,” she reflects.
After finishing university in 1997, they found a flat in Edinburgh for a year before moving to Dunfermline, where they settled, married and had their children. Ann Marie worked as a paediatric staff nurse with NHS Fife while Geoff worked in financial services in Edinburgh. They were hectic years: she recalls 12-hour night shifts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday while Geoff had busy Monday-to-Friday hours.
Their sliding doors moment came in 2006 when Geoff was blocked from taking up a higher-paid position at the company where he worked. “It was a bit more money so I would have been able to reduce my hours. His manager refused to release him,” Ann Marie recalls. “We were devastated.”
Discussing their options, she raised the possibility of emigrating. Once Geoff realised she wasn’t joking, he quickly established that Ann Marie’s nursing skills meant they would be accepted in Australia. They lined up an agency that would deal with visas, sold their house in Scotland in late 2007 and spent a month with family in Northern Ireland before flying to Australia in January 2008.
Geoff had done phone interviews before leaving the UK and soon had a choice of job offers. After taking time to get the children settled, Ann Marie heard from another paediatric nurse who had also moved from the UK about a position supporting children with high medical needs and their families at home.
Her first role was caring for a baby that was being discharged from hospital with a tracheostomy tube to help them breathe. She also worked for several years as a nurse with Very Special Kids, an Australian non-profit that provides palliative and end-of-life care to children.
Ann Marie landed more permanent work with Monash Health, including visiting ill children at home and carer training for children with complex medical needs. After being involved in the development of a Coordinator role to handle referrals into the service, she was appointed to that role. In 2017, she was appointed to a Nurse Manager position in the new Monash Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.
“There was lots of respiratory, cardiac and general medicine, but we also had half of the ward dedicated to paediatric oncology,” she says. “That team had 85 people at its busiest point.”
Her time in the role spanned the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, which had potentially serious implications for ill and immunosuppressed children. There was the additional challenge of a government mandate that all healthcare workers had to be vaccinated against the virus, with very limited exceptions.
“We had to go through a termination process with those staff that chose to not be vaccinated,” says Ann Marie. “I found that very emotionally challenging because you’ve known these staff for a long time.”
The learnings from her Master’s helped with that period and also supported her application for a Director of Clinical Operations role at the start of 2022. Ann Marie had a difficult decision to make, however, as the role was in adult general medicine rather than paediatrics.
“Do I do that and stay with Monash because I know the organisation and people? Or do I look for something that’s paediatric-specific and have to move to a new organisation and relearn everything? I decided I was better sticking where I am and trying something new.”
She was in her role for 18 months when an opportunity came up in Specialist Consulting, involving outpatient services at three Monash Health hospitals. Ann Marie now manages the operations of “big, busy clinics” covering every medical specialty. “It’s so varied,” she says. “Last year, the programme I work for made over half a million appointments.”
Patient referrals are managed electronically through Clanwilliam’s HealthLink, one of New Zealand’s leading messaging networks, which connects medical organisations across Australia and New Zealand, and are handled by a referral management system. Ann Marie’s Health Information role also has responsibility for a team of about 18 people who look after scanned medical records.
“When I started in nursing, everything – every single thing – was on paper,” she recalls. “Now it’s predominantly electronic and you’re using data every day.” Ann Marie says her “eyes have been opened to technology”, particularly since the introduction of an electronic medical record system at Monash Health in 2018, when she was still working on wards.
Doctors now type their notes into an electronic form, which is uploaded and accessible to their medical colleagues. If a patient needs new medication or IV fluids, any doctor on duty can view their record electronically and approve the request. “The information sharing is so much faster,” she says.
Having so much data to hand allows Ann Marie and her teams to look at what works well at the clinics and what can be improved. The data also feeds into compliance reporting back to the Australian Department of Health. “We’re always trying to work on improvements so we go digging and look at the data,” she says. “It’s like a puzzle. I love it.”
Ann Marie is interested in the next generation of technology, including smart dictation and the potential for AI applications to improve efficiencies. “Healthcare hasn’t really kept up to date with technology as fast as it could but I’m very keen to see where we go next,” she says.
On the flipside to technology, Ann Marie is also passionate about Schwartz Rounds, a structured forum for healthcare staff to talk about the emotional aspects of their work. The concept was developed by the US-based Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare, founded by cancer patient Ken Schwartz, and is used by healthcare providers around the world.
“During his end-of-life care, Ken Schwartz noticed he felt better when staff showed him real compassion,” says Ann Marie, who is a facilitator in Schwarz Rounds. “It’s about the compassionate side of healthcare, how we – as health professionals – can really help change people’s journey. We have had topics like ‘the patient I’ll never forget’ and a breast cancer panel with surgeons and specialist nurses.”
Ann Marie’s base in central Melbourne is a long way from Ballycastle and her first steps into nursing in Scotland. Her children are now in their twenties and the family have been Australian citizens since 2012.
She credits her dynamism to her mother, “a very determined woman” and big believer in hard work.
“I didn’t ever think I would have these opportunities, working at this level in executive teams, but I’m a big believer in the old Irish saying, ‘What’s for you won’t go by you’,” she says. “You always have to try new things and see where it goes. We’ll see what the next chapter brings.”
Read more inspiring stories from some of our other Healthcare Trailblazers.
Back to Stories
