Julie’s early ambition was to be a physical education teacher. Instead, to the great loss of that noble profession, Julie saw nursing become her career with special emphasis on her interest in midwifery which eventually led to nursing and general hospital administration.
Fast forward. Being in the right place at the right time, Julie was recruited to be involved in planning and actioning the successful joint redevelopment of the St Georges and Box Hill Hospitals in Melbourne. This, which among many good things, elevated her to the level of “an expert in moving hospitals”.
Julie described in graphic detail the huge challenges involved in commissioning new and re-developing already existing hospitals. She illustrated this with fascinating anecdotal word pictures of actual instances with institutions such as the Austin, the Women’s, the Mercy and the Royal Children’s Hospitals, just to name a few.
Other than having to re-locate up to several hundred patients at a time, those in intensive care, very premature babies and others on life support systems such as heart/lung machines have very special needs that require very special solutions to being safely relocated. That is not to mention the transfer of specially bred animals such as mice in the laboratories which require a whole set of different needs to avoid stress and trauma which may prejudice ongoing research.
And so, Julie and her late husband founded “Smooth Hospital Move”, a business that focuses on the “project management for new hospitals, assisting with design, staff training and patient transfer” and just about everything else.
Julie has lived in Melbourne for 35 years and has three children and five grandchildren. Apart from one son who lives in Hong Kong, all live in easy visiting distance from her home in Hawthorn.
Her passions in life are distance swimming, not necessarily in the slow lane and reading. She loves books and more recently listening to audible books and if you care to listen, can recite word perfect the whole of “The Man from Snowy River”.
Julie has long been associated with and admired Rotary for its community work through her husband’s enjoyment of membership of Hawthorn Rotary in the 1980s. While that membership ceased long ago through the pressure of business, Julie is delighted to have been invited to join our Club and through her membership achieve her personal goal of giving back to the community.
And there is a new passion. DIK while having amazingly devoted and willing volunteers desperately needs someone who has the knowledge and sometimes ruthless ability in properly sorting the donated surplus medical consumables into safely re-usable and totally “junk” packages.
Julie is translating her hands-on experience into a definitive manual for the preparation of any future containers with medical contents ready for shipment. Now having this new challenge well in hand she described how it could take up to 400 hours of volunteer time to process the 20 pallets of supplies currently in stock and that there are more constantly on the way.
Her presentation concluded with a lively question and answer session that was a fitting end to an absorbing and non-stop interesting insight into the life of this “member behind the badge”.