Emerging Leaders - Health

August 2009

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Emerging Leaders - Health (news.com.au)

In the ninth of 10 categories in our search for Australia's top 100 young leaders, we turn to those driving innovation and reform in healthcare.

Kerry Graham, 37 Youth mental health social worker

As CEO of Inspire Foundation, Kerry Graham has a firm belief in the ability of young people to shape a better world. No doubt the social worker and former criminal lawyer needs to hold on to that belief when she sees her charges at their most vulnerable. The national foundation was set up in 1996 to counter the then escalating youth suicide rate, and later led to Reach Out, an online program dealing with youth’s mental health needs. Programs address concerns from family break up to bullying, while a new initiative, Act Now, aims to connect young people with the wider community. So far, Graham’s highlight has been setting up alternatives to jail for drug-dependent youth – where needs, not crimes, are the focus. It’s all about “putting young people, not their mental difficulties, at the centre of everything we do”, Graham says.

David Sinclair, 39 Anti-ageing researcher

Professor David Sinclair, a senior researcher at Boston’s Harvard Medical School, says he aims “to make a lasting impact on the health and happiness of humanity”. He’s off to a good start. “In 2003 we discovered a molecule that could activate an anti ageing enzyme,” he says. “I tested it on baker’s yeast … after a week the cells with the molecule were living much longer.” Five years on, Sinclair and his team have made molecules that are 10,000 times more potent; they are now in human clinical trials, with hopes of treating diseases of ageing – including diabetes, cancer and heart disease. The Sydney-born and educated doctor, who made headlines in 2006 by finding that resveratrol in red wine had anti-ageing properties, says his next goal is “getting a drug to market that treats dozens of diseases by targeting the ageing process”.

Tamara Mackean, 36 Indigenous health representative

A public health specialist from the Waljen people of WA’s eastern goldfields, Tamara Mackean is president of the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association and senior research fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Medical and Dental Health at the University of WA. At school in Esperance, her first job was “checkout chick”; then came medical school at UWA, and work and study in Sydney and Adelaide, where she gained clinical experience in obstetrics and gynaecology, psychiatry and ophthalmology before returning to WA last year. Mackean says the AIDA presidency is a highlight so far, having taught her a lot professionally and personally, although she has never thought of herself as a leader. “I just wanted to get in there, work towards a better future and bring other people with me,” she says. “If it has given others hope and inspiration then I’ve done a good job.”

Tim Henderson, 45 Eye surgeon

Born in Britain but raised in central Africa where his father and grandfather were missionary doctors, Dr Tim Henderson is eye specialist to central Australia (director of ophthalmology) and heads the eye department at Alice Springs Hospital – a job that continues the family tradition. Every year he makes more than 30 visits, mainly by air, to the NT’s remote indigenous communities; for a time, he was the only eye surgeon looking after 55,000 patients over 1.6 million sq km – an effort that won him an Unsung Hero Award from the late actor Paul Newman’s charity. With a much-needed sense of humour, Henderson quotes his favourite referral letter: “Please can you perform cataract surgery on this man. He is a senior elder and drives around at five mph, despite being blind.” Henderson describes performing sight restoring surgery as an “extraordinary privilege”.

Clare Skinner, 35 Healthcare reform advocate

Labelling herself a proud graduate of the state high school system – followed by Canberra’s ANU and Sydney University – Dr Clare Skinner says her clinical career in NSW’s public hospitals has seen her often inspired by the courage of patients and carers. The emergency registrar at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney is a founding member of the Hospital Reform Group, an assembly of front line clinicians lobbying for improved resources and staffing for the public health system. Skinner’s goal is to be involved in redesigning such systems, making them more responsive to the needs of patients and staff. She describes health as a fundamental human right, saying that without equitable access to good healthcare we can’t achieve our potential. “My philosophy is, ‘Don’t whinge, do something about it,’” she says.

Samantha Thomas, 36 Health sociologist

She began her health career as a 10-year-old washing medicine bottles at her parents’ Auckland pharmacy, but Dr Samantha Thomas’s first real job was at the World Health Organisation, Geneva. She went on to study the health of soldiers and embedded journalists connected with the Iraq war while at King’s College London; epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and the lives of refugee children at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, before taking up a position at Monash as health sociologist and senior research fellow. The mother of two seeks to understand the socio-cultural factors that contribute to chronic disease and much of her work now is in obesity. She says: “Let’s stop fixating on weight and start thinking about wellbeing, shifting our message from ‘skinny equals healthy’ to ‘health at any size’.”

Michael Bonning, 24 Depression awareness campaigner / intern

As immediate past president of the Australian Medical Students’ Association and a director of beyondblue, the national depression initiative, Queensland-born and educated Dr Michael Bonning spent last year campaigning for better education, training and jobs for Australia’s 13,000 young doctors. Now an intern at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, Bonning is working with his profession’s key body, the Australian Medical Association, to take a bigger role in beyondblue’s public awareness campaigns while continuing to promote doctors’ own health, an often overlooked issue. “Speaking up for those who don’t have a voice is of supreme importance,” he says. And a healthy medical profession? “It’s about making sure that there is a sustainable, safe, well-trained and healthy medical workforce that can deliver medical care equitably anywhere in the country.”

Michelle Ammerer, 37 Cardiologist

Perth-based Dr Michelle Ammerer is living proof that “a busy person can achieve more”. The interventional cardiologist and director of coronary care at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital manages patient care, budgets and staff, while balancing political constraints and public and media awareness. She is also a director of the National Heart Foundation’s WA branch and a founding member of Go Red for Women, a campaign aimed at “raising awareness of heart disease in women at a national level”. On the home front, she is mother to two small children. Ammerer has a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery from the University of WA; in 2004 she was one of five from 900 applicants to complete a Clinical and Research Fellowship in Interventional Cardiology at Harvard Medical School. She is the only female cardiologist in WA specialising in angioplasty.

Paul Hodges, 39 Spinal pain researcher

With PhDs in physiotherapy and neuroscience, Professor Paul Hodges is a “hands on” man when it comes to treating the leading cause of disability, chronic spinal pain. As director of the University of Queensland’s CCRE Spine – Centre of Clinical Research Excellence in Spinal Pain, Injury and Health – the Victorian-born, Queensland-educated professor and his staff have made great advances in the understanding of such pain. These include identification of strategies the brain uses to control the spine and how these strategies change in those with spinal pain. The winner of numerous awards, including the International Society for the Study of Lumbar Pain prize in 2006, Hodges is heading an international research team to understand why people move from acute to chronic pain “and to provide a basis for interventions to prevent that transition”.

Claire Rickard, 37 Professor of Nursing

Having started out as a registered nurse in a public hospital, and risen to become professor of nursing and a lead researcher at Griffith University, Queensland, Claire Rickard is heartened to see that those who were once rarely consulted or offered research opportunities are now getting a go. “I’m very fortunate to work with so many great clinical nurses who are now also undertaking research,” she says. Last year, Brisbane-born Rickard and her team won Australia’s Nursing Innovation of the Year award for work on reducing blood loss associated with test samples drawn from intravascular devices, such as IV drips. She says it’s promising that more hospital wards and health settings now have full-time nursing researchers to complement clinical staff. “But we need to aim towards making this a standard – not an extra,” she says.

Originally published asEmerging Leaders - Health