Recently, after I stepped down as CEO of Palliative Care Tasmania, the Minister for Health delivered a speech in Parliament acknowledging my contribution and the work of the organisation over the past few years.
It’s a strange experience, hearing your work reflected back like that, especially in a setting like Parliament.
Because most of what actually creates change doesn’t happen there. It happens in the in-between.
The conversations that go nowhere before they go somewhere. The slow work of building trust.
The constant back and forth between what government is trying to do and what communities actually need.
That’s where I’ve spent a lot of time.
At Palliative Care Tasmania, the job was never just about raising awareness. It was about shifting behaviour, strengthening the sector and making sure good ideas didn’t just sit in strategy documents, they turned into funded, practical outcomes.
Some of that looked like large-scale campaigns. Some of it looked like programs like Learning Through Loss, quietly building grief literacy across schools and communities. A lot of it looked like sitting around tables with people who didn’t always agree, working out how to move forward anyway.
None of it is done alone. The impact over those years came from clinicians, community organisations, educators, advocates, government partners and people with lived experience who were willing to lean in and do the work together.
So the acknowledgement matters. Not in a personal sense, but in what it says more broadly. That palliative care is being taken seriously. That conversations people used to avoid are now happening more openly. That the sector has shifted, and will keep shifting.
For me, it’s also a line in the sand.
As I think about what comes next, I know I want to stay close to this kind of work. The messy, interesting, high-stakes space where strategy, influence and delivery all intersect, work where you’re not just talking about change, you’re responsible for making it happen.
Because that’s the part I’ve always been drawn to.
And if the past few years have shown anything, it’s that when you get the mix right, you can move things that don’t look like they’re going to move.
Every now and then, someone notices.
But the real value is in the shift itself. And if you’re trying to move something that feels stuck, that’s the work I now spend my time on.
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