By Max Davies
A Wallan nurse with a dedicated health career is among 1191 Australians on the King’s Birthday Honours List, announced yesterday.
Tracey Webster, a nurse since the 1980s, has been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, OAM, for her service to nursing and to community health with a range of different hospitals and organisations.
Throughout her career she has served as nurse unit manager at The Kilmore and District Hospital and supported the maternity unit at Seymour Health, been director at Mitchell Community Health, and most recently in various roles at Northern Health.
Ms Webster said she was humbled to receive the honour and almost did not believe it was real when first contacted.
“I’m very humbled, because in everything I do I’m part of a team. For me, I accept the OAM but on behalf of all other nurses and all healthcare workers, especially from our community,” she said.
“I’m privileged to serve as well, especially for Northern Health. I accept it on behalf of all the healthcare workers in the local area because they’ve just been phenomenal.
“They work so hard to really make a difference to each and every person we serve in the community. I don’t see [the award] for me, I see it for them.”
Early in her career Ms Webster worked to introduce supportive care screenings for oncology patients at Kilmore hospital before moving to Mitchell Community Health, where she led the support and counselling service for the Marysville community in response to the bushfires at the time.
While director at Mitchell Community Health she also worked as part of the team who secured grants for the first super clinic in Wallan, as well as pushed to secure the first exercise physiologist ever in Victoria at a time when such professionals were hard to come by.
Ms Webster has now worked at Northern Health for about four years and was instrumental in the service’s response to COVID-19, serving as the project officer and virtual care coordinator for telehealth since the start of the pandemic.
In 2021, she was awarded the Northern Health Patient Experience Staff Recognition Award.
Ms Webster said she was proud of the work the hospital was doing and spoke highly of her colleagues, especially chief executive Siva Sivarajah and chief health outcomes officer Katharine See.
“We’ve got the most visionary [chief executive] and we’re working on collecting information and measuring what matters most to patients. He really wants us to work on changing to care that demonstrates we fit the patients as best we can, not the patients fitting into what we’re doing,” she said.
“Doctor Katharine See is also absolutely amazing, it’s just such a privilege to work with her to implement patient reported outcomes measures across Northern Health and measure what matters most to patients.”
Ms Webster also featured as the nurse in Ambulance Victoria’s Save Triple Zero Calls for Emergencies advertisement campaign, volunteering to take part a few years ago to help reduce the use of ambulances for non-urgent calls.
She encouraged anyone interested in nursing to consider it as a career.
Ms Webster said she was excited about the future of healthcare with the introduction of new technology planned for the coming years.
“To be able to still be in my career after 38 years of experience is pretty amazing, and to be able to do this transformation stuff with our community is pretty wonderful and I’m really lucky,” she said.
“Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like me, I’m just someone who goes to work every day trying to make a difference to every patient, every day.
“I’ll still be me, be humble and work hard at everything I do but it’s nice to just be recognised.”
