By Tate Papworth
What’s your favourite thing about Brimbank?
I love the multiculturalism. I love the way people are proud of where they come from and they show it off with things like food, festivals.
What do you think we could do better?
We all need to accept one another.
You’ve worked at Western Health for 39 years. What’s kept you around for so long?
The women and their babies. I only planned to stay here for five years when I first came here, but the women kept me around. I love the multiculturalism of Sunshine Hospital and I love educating these migrant families.
The west has exploded in the past few years, which I’m sure has impacted the hospital. What’s been the biggest challenge?
It’s so much busier. It’s that much harder to keep people working as a team because it’s so large. It’s like when your family gets bigger you lose contact with some people. We find that we’ve got little pods of areas now, whereas before we were a lot smaller and more compact and we worked better as a team. It’s just the acuity. We’re so busy.
Tell us a bit about your role.
I’m a mother craft nurse. I work alongside midwives and as of recently I do breast feeding assistance. So I visit most of the new mums or the ladies who are having breast feeding issues and I do breast feeding classes every third Saturday. I like to include the partners in these talks too because they’re part of the family. Education aspect has really developed over the years. We’re empowering these women with information so they can make choices.
You’ve mentioned multiculturalism a few times – how does the diversity of the west impact your job?
It’s beautiful. People come from all different cultures and we can learn from that. It’s not really a challenge with things like language barriers because we have translators and all sorts of things like that. It can be different cultures and the way they bring up their children. Just because we live in a wealthy English society doesn’t mean our way is the right way.
You must be excited about the Joan Kirner Hospital about to open?
I can’t wait to go to the new building. These women are going to be blown away when they see what we’ve got. Just for me, I’ve seen such a difference from what we started off with in my early days at Footscray Hospital. I never thought I’d see the day where I’d see something like this. Medicine has changed a lot – for the better.
