Two new nursing leaders have taken up the helm as directors of nursing at Northland and Nelson-Marlborough District Health boards.
Margareth Broodkoorn took up her position in Northland in April and Robyn Henderson in February in Nelson.
For Broodkoorn, who was born in the Hokianga but raised in Auckland, the new position feels like a home-coming.
Broodkoorn, who is of Ngā Puhi and Dutch descent, initially trained in Auckland Hospital in the late1980s and worked in Auckland, Greenlane and National Women’s Hospitals, until taking on a nurse educator role at MIT in the mid-1990s.
She returned to Auckland District Health Board in the late 1990s to work as a new graduate coordinator alongside up-and-coming Mäori nursing leaders like Taima Campbell and – after several years with a Māori health provider – took up a joint University of Auckland and Auckland DHB role as associate director of nursing: Māori.
Having moved to Northland in 2000 she commuted to work in Auckland for a number of years before relatively recently taking up a position in the North as community and clinical development manager with Hauora Hokianga.
She says she is excited about taking on the director’s role in a time of change in the health sector and is looking forward to building on the work of former director Denise Brewster-Webb, who rebuilt the role after it was disestablished early on in the decade.
Broodkoorn says one of the challenges of the role is communicating with nurses across the region, including the five strong Māori providers and the aged-care sector. She says her last job with Hauora Hokianga helped her build links with the wider primary health care sector. She is also part of the advisory group for the Māori nursing and midwifery development group Nga Manukura o Āpōpō, which in early May is launching an emerging leadership programme, with tenders currently out to find a provider.
Robyn Henderson was born in Southland and trained in Dunedin, following a family tradition, with her mother, grandmother and two sisters being nurses. On graduating she moved to Palmerston North where she worked up into leadership roles and studied nursing and psychology at Massey University. She returned south in the 1990s to work in a variety of consultant roles in southern hospitals, including a stint as director of nursing on the West Coast.
Later she was director of nursing at St Michael’s Hospital in Dublin and then moved into aged-care in New Zealand, where she was acting operations general manager for the former Guardian Healthcare (now Bupa). Her most recent position was quality and risk manager for the Oceania Group. She is currently completing a PhD, focusing on aged-care.
Henderson says working in
the Irish health sector has provided her with a good comparison for health care delivery, given the
two countries’ similar population sizes.
