Safe and connected healthcare with Emma McCahon

For the people of South Australia, I hope they know that if they come to one of the services at Carlin, they're getting best in world treatment. I probably wouldn't choose any other place. From the Central Level Aid Local Health Network, this is Our People, where we introduce you to some of Carlin's dedicated workforce who provide world-class health care services to our community. Sharing human stories is our aim through Carlin's Our People podcast. It's where we peek behind the scenes to meet the people who deliver health care and learn about the passions, hopes, fears and experiences that have shaped them and underpin their drive to improve public health in South Australia. In season one of our people, we talked with a palliative care physician, a well-being specialist and a bone marrow transplant scientist among many others across the network. We're kicking off season two with a very special guest, Carlin's CEO, Dr Emma McCarn. Emma joined the network in January 2024 and she hit the ground running with a busy first 12 months packed with plenty of opportunities and some challenges. This chat is a chance to learn more about Emma, her background as a clinician working with children and what makes her tick as a health care leader in this state in 2025 and into the future. Welcome Emma to this episode of Our People. Well thank you for having me, Carlin. Now you have been CEO at Parlin for 12 months so we're starting to get to know you better. But let's find out more about the bigger Emma McCarn's story, how did you start your career in medicine? It's an interesting story. I didn't actually want to be a doctor. I wanted to be a vet. I didn't get the marks to get in and so then studied medicine and I'm so glad I did because I've had so many opportunities. I went into pediatrics and started studying in Melbourne and then I moved to Sydney to complete more of my study and then actually got the opportunity to go to Vancouver. I lived in Vancouver for two years to complete my studies in pediatrics and then came back to Sydney and worked there or probably lost count maybe about 15 years. Working my way through general pediatrics and being a pediatric oncologist and working in both those specialties and then ending up in leadership positions which eventually brought me to Adelaide. I'm going to come back to that in a moment but I'm curious as to what drew you to pediatrics. I did an emergency rotation in my internia. It was a mixed emergency department so we had children and adults presenting to the emergency department and that was the first time I started to get to see children and I just enjoyed it so much more than adult medicine to be completely honest. I liked their honesty, I liked the fact that when they were sick they were sick and they're well, they were well. I loved the element of play in terms of how you treat children and get them to come along with treatment and I really just gravitated to it and did very little adult medicine to be completely honest and the irony is not lost on me that Carlon really does no pediatrics. Well, you mentioned earlier leadership positions and then finding yourself in Adelaide. Can you talk me through what that part of your career looked like? Let me take you back just a little bit so I'd worked in Sydney, I'd worked in pediatrics and then in a pediatric executive position. I then moved into a large metropolitan health service in Sydney, much of which was based around adult medicine. I then had the opportunity to move to Central Queensland as the chief executive and so that's based around Rockhampton, huge rural and regional health service in Queensland and I was really prior to moving there quite naive to the challenges of rural and regional medicine and I absolutely loved my time there because when you say we are delivering care to your family, we were the only health service for the whole of Central Queensland so I learned an awful lot about the commitment of staff, about the challenges, about how to run a health service and so when the opportunity came up to come to Adelaide, although it's a big metropolitan health service, we are the biggest in South Australia, we run about 40% of the health care system and I just felt it was such an opportunity to influence both the services that were delivered at Carlin, but also for people right across South Australia and from my experience in Central Queensland I know how important that is to ensure that everyone across South Australia has really good access to services. Yes I see and by this stage you then had Pediatrics, Adult Medicine, Rural and Regional Medicine, Big City Medicine, you had the whole compliment really under your belt, didn't you? I've been so fortunate the opportunities that have come up in my career that have given me as you say this real 360 view of how to deliver health services, I've been very lucky. What keeps you getting out of bed and motivated to create positive change every day? That's a good question. I'm not a morning person, so motivating me to get out of bed is a tricky thing, usually good coffee. I actually just really like working with teams of people who deliver health care and seeing teams excel at what they do, when a team really gels and you see them do a good job, for me that's why we do this, I occasionally get to go and hang out with the clinical teams, you know I've been and visited some of the clinics that we have here at Carlin or been on ward rounds or I can't need the Mer team on one of their responses to a sick patient. I want to watch the people and the teams and I see them being highly professional, delivering compassionate care and I know that I can create an environment for them to do that, I think that's what really gets me out of bed. I love that. Health is such an incredibly diverse and full of variety kind of career and space, so I imagine there's always something either new or changing or something fascinating to one cover. Oh absolutely and sometimes it's not even on the front line, okay I had a lovely conversation the other day with the person who runs the kitchen at the Queen Elizabeth, we forget that it takes a whole village to deliver health care, you know we've got the health care professionals on the front line, you've got you know our cleaners, our kitchens, our trades people, our finance people, our contract people, for me yes it's about the diversity of what we do in terms of delivering health care but also a diversity of the team and the skills that have to be in that team to make it happen. As you say, Colin is a large health network, it looks after thousands of patients and families in the broader community every day across emergency services to mental health, cancer care, surgery, allied health, rehabilitation and of course a lot more. What is your approach in leading the delivery of health care at Colin? My approach is that it takes all of us that everyone is part of the story when it comes to delivering health care and that we have to remember that the people are the arms and legs of that. So for me it's actually all about the people. So I see my job as still after the people who look after the patients. So my approach is how do I, as I said earlier, create an environment where staff can actually be their best self, do they have the skills and the education they need to do their job, do they have their support around them, do they have the resources around them? You know, some of those are really tricky things to do in the public health environment but it's so important that we get it right so that our people can do what they're trained to do. What that looks like day to day is most of my time is spent with people, understanding what it takes to do their job, helping make good decisions about that. If I look back over the last 12 months, I've visited over 100 teams across Colin, some of them are clinical teams, some of them are business support teams. For me, it's really getting to know the people who run the business and then also investing in their leaders. And so over the last while we've really spent some time talking to our leaders, connecting our leaders, running workshops for our leaders through the leadership space so that they have the skills and knowledge that they need to support all of our teams as well. When you think about the experiences that you've had and the health leadership that you promote, how do those two come together at Colin? I think, unfortunately, I have a lot of opportunities that sit outside of health to bring those skills and those experiences back into health, both, you know, as we talked about, you know, across multiple jurisdictions. But I always had the opportunity to do an MBA so I got to spend a lot of time with a whole lot of business people and learn how they think and how they approach their business and how we can learn in health. I had the opportunity during COVID to work with some very unlikely team members in a vaccination center that I ran. I had 200 quanters flight crew working for me and surprisingly I learned so much about patient flow from them. There's a whole lot of things that they just came to me and said, "Emma, we don't think you should do it that way. You should do it this way. This is what we've learnt from moving large groups of people rapidly through a large space and said that was fantastic." And so, wrong my experiences and, you know, what I've kind of brought back into Karl and there's probably no one thing. It's this whole collage of lots of different experiences, lots of different learnings. And I suspect that's the thing I really liked learning from people and learning about people. And I think to be a good leader and to leader team like Karl and that's got to be at the core of your approach. Lovely. Now at Karl and you have what's called a safe and connected care approach. What does that mean to you? When we looked at our values and when we looked at our strategic ambitions and we wanted to sum them up in the way we want to be known at Karl and our ways of working the way we want to do things, we summed it up, we're safe and connected. So, what are we doing to make sure that our staff are safe? What are the processes and systems and things that are we doing to ensure that our staff are safe and what are we doing to make sure our patients are safe. And then what are we doing to make sure that our staff are connected, both connected as teams, connected teams to teams, connected with leaders? And what are we doing to make sure that our patient journey is connected? So, when they come into our care and we hand them back over to primary health, go back into the community. So, for me, safe and connected really sums up the way we do all the things at Karl and in all the little things that we do and all the big things that we do in the decisions we make in the way that we approach each other as a team and a way we approach our patient care and it should be safe and connected. And is that something that's been a priority in your leadership since you've come on board? I think it was always there. As I've learnt from going around and talking to people at Karl and people are really committed to delivering high-quality care right across all the teams at Karl and if I sum up what they have been trying to do, it's been trying to be safe and connected, that's what they've been focused on. So, really, I've just elevated that and started to articulate it and make it an absolute priority. So that when I said to someone, "Oh, what are you working on at the moment? How is that making Karl and what's safe and connected?" It really sharpens people's focus on what's really important. Now, Emma, we're now at the start of 2025. What are the opportunities that you see for Karl and over the coming year and then beyond? Oh, there are so many opportunities for Karl and I think linking back into a safe and connected, we are really starting to roll that out right through the organisation. How do we come together as an organisation, where do we share information as a team that we need to do our job, where do we share information about patients and so we'll be talking about safe and connected all year and how we can use that to elevate, I suppose, our performance in terms of delivering care for patients. We are doing really well on some of our other performance indicators and I love seeing teams celebrate their successes and starting to lift and so we'll be starting to focus more on our performance focus areas, which are emergency access to care, mental health access to care and how we create a sustainable budget, all of which are really important in terms of making sure we're doing the right things for our community. Are there any specific areas you'd like to go into detail that we can expect through 2025? So when we talk about safe and connected, I know that the heart and lung program have been piloting some of this work for us and they're starting to do huddles where they come together as a team at the beginning of the day and they celebrate what we're well yesterday and say is there anything that we could have done better yesterday and learn from it and then they talk about what they need as a team to get their work done, if there's any patients that they're concerned about, any problems that they need to solve and anything that they need to escalate up through the organisation that someone else needs to know about and it's really starting to ensure that our staff and our patients are safe and connected. What we will do is take the learnings from the heart and lung program and start to roll it out right across the organisation so that everyone has, I suppose, this vehicle to make sure that information is shared around what our staff need and what our patients need. Now I hope you had a chance for a bit of rest and relaxation over the summer. You enjoy reading and podcasts as a way to learn and find some inspiration for your own day-to-day work and working with other leaders. Can you share some of your recent reads or recent listens that perhaps we could add to our own lists during a dog walk or a drive? Oh, I've got so many things on the code at the moment. I don't know where to start. There's a real mix. So a podcast I really like listening to is diary of a CEO, so this is a wide-raging podcast of all sorts of things from science to para-science to just people's experience, so I really like that again, I think, because I'm learning about people. I have a part of books that I've tried to get through, some of which are just fiction books, some of which are non-fiction books I quite like historical fiction, because I think both that entertains me, but I also didn't learn something. Not a problem. Now outside of podcasts and good reads, where else do you find inspiration? I like visiting new places and meeting new people when opportunities come up around meeting people outside of health and learning from them. I love to do that. Recently, I had a lovely conversation with someone from banking randomly who was talking about change management in banking and how they do it at scale. If you think back five or six years ago, the bank branch is everywhere and now they don't have it. That's a huge change. I'm kind of chatting about that and what they'd learnt about that. I had a lovely chat to an artist the other day and you know how they'd built up their own business and their own gallery. So I suppose for me, I get inspiration from often outside of health and just learning how other people think and how they sort of problems and it really starts to challenge the way I think and give me a different perspective when I come back into some of the really tricky challenges that we've had in health for a long time. Well, the leadership space certainly is large and there's lots of places to draw inspiration from. So that makes perfect sense. Look just finally Emma as we wrap up. What message for your people and I guess in tandem patients, South Australian patients who may come through the doors of Karlin over the coming year, what message do you have for them? I suppose firstly, I have worked across Australia, I've worked in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, I've worked in the States, I've worked in Canada and I have to say, coming to Karlin, this is one of the highest skilled committed compassionate workforces that I've ever seen. So firstly, I want to say thank you to the people of Karlin because I really think they are quite amazing. The clinicians, the clinical support, you know, without exception, really the people that I've met, I'm so proud to have on our teams. And I think for the people of South Australia, I hope they know that if they come to one of the services at Karlin, they're getting, you know, best in world treatment. And you know, I probably wouldn't choose to go any other place. Well, that's very comforting for all South Australians to know. So thank you so much, Dr Emma McCart, CEO of Central Adelaide Local Health Network. Thank you for sharing your experiences, your stories and for joining me in the Karlin studio for our people, my pleasure. Thank you for listening to our people. For more episodes in this series, find us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or a rating and share this series with your colleagues and friends. This podcast was developed by the Central Adelaide Local Health Network. We would like to acknowledge the Garner people and pay our respects to their elders, past, present and emerging and acknowledge their spiritual connection to the land on which this podcast is recorded.