The Lamp introduces our new Assistant General Secretary Katrina Bough who talks about her journey to leadership.

Katrina comes from a family steeped in nursing.

“My mum and my grandma had long careers in ED nursing and midwifery,” she says.

“I grew up sitting around my grandmother’s table, surrounded by nurses who were her colleagues and friends listening to their stories and was always in admiration of their profession. So, when I started my training, during my very first placement, when I sat in a tearoom for morning tea, it felt like sitting in my grandmother’s house. I felt very comfortable, almost like I was at home.”

“In my early 20s, I decided nursing was what I wanted to do. I had three small children when I started my nursing journey.

“My grandmother used to travel up from Sydney to stay at my house so that my husband and I could both go to work because it was difficult with three children under the age of 10.

“I used to take my son to uni lectures when he was three or four, and he would sit and watch videos on a portable DVD player. Or in a tutorial, he would sit under the desk and play with his little figurines. He became a bit of a classroom favourite.”

A STRONG UNION ENVIRONMENT

Both her mother and grandmother were union members “and my grandfather was a very staunch union man”.

“He worked on the wharves. He was a clerk. He was very supportive of workers and their rights. He taught me a lot about being part of a collective and the camaraderie of being union.”

“And then when I started working and did my orientation and started working shift work, it became really apparent to me the importance of having that camaraderie on the floor. I worked in a unionised workplace where pay and conditions were discussed openly, so being in the union felt natural and an important part of everyday life.”

Katrina says the thing about nursing she loves are the relationships with other people.

“When I started nursing, I spent a lot of my time focusing on my clinical skills. Working with people at their most vulnerable times, it is so important to be kind, compassionate and a really effective communicator. I worked in general surgical, then I went to ED. I worked as a casual for a long time so that I could work everywhere, from ICU to rehab to geriatrics. I often mentored nursing students and loved watching them succeed. I moved into Clinical Facilitation for my local University so I could continue to develop undergraduate nursing students to have job ready clinical skills and found this to be so rewarding.”

“I loved nursing, and I still love it.”

At the heart of this love affair with the profession is the relationship with nursing colleagues, she says.

“You always see nurses walking in groups. You’ll see nurses walking to lunch in pairs or threes or fours. There’s that sense of camaraderie that you finish when everyone finishes, and you all get your bags and walk out together, and that kind of collective ‘I’ve got your back’. You celebrate together. You do everything together.”

A KEY WORKPLACE LEADER IN OUR EPIC FIGHT AGAINST PRIVATISATION

Katrina cut her campaigning teeth in the fight against the privatisation of five rural and regional hospitals – including Wyong Hospital – announced in September 2016 by the then Liberal health minister, Jillian Skinner.

At the time Katrina had been the President of the Wyong branch for one week.

“It was really the beginning of my leadership journey. Wyong was a bit of a sleeping giant. It had a lot of Union members but hadn’t been super active. The campaign really activated the members of that hospital.

“I learned so much from that campaign. I learned how to engage the community, how to engage my peers, how to talk to MPs.

“We had conversations with the community; we did letterbox drops. A colleague created a Facebook page – ‘Wyong loves its public hospital’ – and we grew that page to have 13,000 supporters.

“We talked to community members at market stalls, and we did petitions. We put in the legwork, and we had conversation after conversation so that people understood what a risk the privatisation was.

“The community started out disappointed but then they became angry. The land had been purchased by coal miners and then gifted to build a hospital. People felt betrayed by a government that was going to sell a community hospital to make money or reduce health care services in a lower social economic area.”

When the government backflipped on the privatisations, “it was overwhelming, exciting”, she says.

“I just remember sitting on the floor in the kitchen and I started crying because it had been 15 or 16 months of campaigning every weekend, after every shift with community events. It was really the nurses that drove that campaign.”

TIME TO IMPROVE THE LIVES OF NURSES

Katrina says when her father passed away, the timing felt right to move into a new space and away from bedside nursing and that the Association seemed like a good vehicle for improving the lives of nurses and midwives.

“It felt like the natural move to come and share my newfound skills with my fellow nurses and midwives across the State. I wanted to help care for the people who care for the people!

“I’ve learned that the thing that brings me most joy and the thing that excites me is seeing nurses and midwives find their voice and understanding their rights, and exercising them in a way that’s productive and effective for them.”

“My new responsibility is to ensure that the members have a really bright future in nursing and midwifery. I want to work with them to do that, whatever that looks like to them that nurses have control over their own destiny in their workplace and in life.”