Thursday June 15, 2023
In the year she celebrates her 10-year anniversary with Eastern Health, Professor Julie Considine RN, PhD has been honoured with the Officer of the Order (AO) during the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours.
Prof Considine was recognised for her service to medicine in the field of emergency nursing, tertiary education and professional associations.
“It was quite exciting. It’s been so stressful keeping it a secret. When I was in Brisbane with the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation, I was seeing all my international friends and colleagues for the first time in four years and I couldn’t tell. My mum and dad were pretty thrilled.
“I’m really proud of myself, I’ve worked hard for a really long time. I’m proud that nursing has been recognised at that level, because I think often nurses are overlooked in many spaces. I’m really thrilled to be representing my profession and particularly emergency nursing,” she said.
Prof Considine holds a joint appointment between Eastern Health and Deakin University, setting the strategic direction for nursing midwifery research across Eastern Health.
One of her current projects includes a $3.6 million National Health and Medical Research Council funded trial, running across 31 emergency departments (ED) down the eastern seaboard. Eastern Health is home to the only participating ED in Victoria.
“We’re testing a patient assessment framework, and if we get the results that we’re hoping for, it’s going to be a game changer for emergency nursing in Australia and has the potential to change how we educate emergency nurses. The trial is at a level that’s never been done before in Australia.
“When we applied for the grant, the success rate of actually gaining a grant was 30 percent. We’re the only nurse-led group that received funding. So this is a big deal and having Eastern Health as part of it for me is amazing and also because my love and my passion is emergency nursing,” Prof Considine explained.
Her unrelenting enthusiasm for emergency nursing has never faltered, with her persistence to carve a place out for herself in the field, going back to when she first started studying.
“I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. All through high school I loved science, I was a real science and maths nerd, and I was always fascinated by biology and chemistry. I was hospital trained at the Royal Melbourne so I wore a starched apron and red cape. At 19 I was in second year and we had our first rotation to the emergency department and it was pretty full on.
“Despite everything else I did through my training, nothing ever came close to the ED and so as soon as I finished my training, every week I was down knocking on the door of the admin asking if I could have a job. In those days it was really hard to get a job in ED; you had to wait for someone to leave and because I was so junior I really struggled to get a foot in the door and I think I wore her down,” Prof Considine recalled.
As her career developed, Prof Considine wore many hats including clinician, educator and researcher. She strives for her work to improve the care and experiences of consumers and create innovative opportunities for those in the field.
“The ‘end game’ for me is the patient and family at the end of the process. What is really rewarding is if we can make things better for them, and whether that’s directly or indirectly by educating nurses, doing research to work out what the best way for nurses is to deliver care,” she concluded.