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Keynote speakers

Luc Longley is a trailblazer whose inherent sense of curiosity led him to become the first-ever Australian to play in the NBA and the starting centre of one of the best teams of all time, the Chicago Bulls and was a critical component in their famous three-peat, winning back to back championships from 1996-1998 and setting an NBA record with 72 wins and only 10 losses. He was coached and mentored by the legendary Phil Jackson and played alongside some of basketball's most iconic players including Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Toni Kukoc and Steve Kerr. The Team, and this incredible accomplishment, were the subjects of the 2020 Netflix & ESPN Documentary, The Last Dance.

He also represented Australia in three Olympic Teams including at the 1988 Seoul Olympics which delivered Australia's best result for the Men's Team until 2021. In 2019 he was named a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to basketball as a player, coach and administrator.

Professor Fiona Wood has been a burns surgeon and researcher for over 20 years and is Director of the Burns Service of Western Australia (BSWA). She is a Consultant Plastic Surgeon at Fiona Stanley Hospital and Perth Children’s Hospital, co-founder of the first skin cell laboratory in WA, Winthrop Professor in the School of Surgery at The University of Western Australia, and co-founder of the Fiona Wood Foundation (formerly The McComb Foundation).

Professor Wood’s greatest contribution and enduring legacy is her work with co-inventor Marie Stoner, pioneering the innovative ‘spray-on skin’ technique (Recell), where today the technique is used worldwide.

In October 2002, Fiona was propelled into the media spotlight when the largest proportion of survivors from the 2002 Bali bombings arrived in Perth where Fiona led the medical team at Royal Perth Hospital to save many lives.

Fiona was named a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2003. In 2004 she was awarded the Western Australia Citizen of the Year award for her contribution to Medicine in the field of burns research. Fiona was then named Australian of the Year for 2005. She is an Australian Living Treasure. Fiona is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science. Fiona is married to fellow surgeon Tony Kierath and is mother to four boys and two girls.

Simon Kuestenmacher is a Director and Co-founder of The Demographics Group based in Melbourne, Australia.  Simon holds degrees in geography from leading universities in Berlin and Melbourne and worked for several years as a business consultant with KPMG Australia.

In 2017 Simon, with Bernard Salt, co-founded The Demographics Group. The group provides specialist advice on demographic, consumer and social trends for business.

Simon has presented to numerous corporate and industry audiences across Australia and overseas on demographic trends, consumer insights and cultural change in Australia. 

Simon is a columnist at The New Daily newspaper and a contributor to The Australian newspaper; and he is also a media commentator on demographic and data matters.

Simon has amassed 300,000 global followers on social media, reaches over 25 million people every month and ranks as one of the world’s Top 10 influencers in data visualisation. If you can’t get enough of data that explains how the world works, make sure to follow him on Twitter or any of his other social channels.

Dr. Verna Yiu is one of Canada’s most respected healthcare leaders. She led the country’s largest provincewide health care system that protects and improves the quality of life for 4.4 million Albertans for over 6 years. 

In her tenure, Dr. Yiu was able to build trust and confidence not only with Albertans but internally with the 100K+ employees of the organization. In Dr. Yiu’s tenure, AHS was named as one of the Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 4 consecutive years along with other employer awards including Best Diversity Employer, Best Employer for Young People, and Alberta’s Top 70 Employer. Other accomplishments include optimizing integration of care within the province, so much so as to receive acknowledgement from the International Society of Integrated Care that AHS was in the top 5 most integrated systems in the world. Other accomplishments during her tenure includes improving efficiencies such that growth expenditure for AHS reduced by more than 50% while still maintaining quality and safety of care, she led and received the support from government to launch the province wide clinical information system called Connect Care that will transform how care is delivered for Albertans (which remains on time and on budget if not for COVID19), and over the past 2+ years, Dr. Yiu led AHS in its response to one of the worse public health crisis we will ever know in our lifetime.

Dr. Yiu has spent more than 2 decades in leadership roles, spanning from leadership roles in academia at the University of Alberta including being the first female interim dean of the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the U of A to that within AHS. She is known to embrace a servant leadership motto where ensuring the success of others inevitably leads to everyone’s success. 

Dr. Yiu has won numerous awards including most recently being Global Woman of Vision in 2019 and being ranked second on the Medical Post’s 2021 Power list of physicians in Canada, behind only Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer.

A professor of Pediatrics in the division of pediatric nephrology at the U of A, Dr. Yiu is an alumni of both University of Alberta and Harvard University. She continues to work on the front lines, providing care to young patients and their families at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton. 

Professor Paul Kelly is currently the Chief Medical Officer at the Australian Government Department of Health. Prior to this appointment, he was the Acting Chief Medical Officer, leading the Government’s health response to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. A public health physician and epidemiologist by training, Professor Kelly first joined the Department in March 2019 as the Chief Medical Adviser, Health Products Regulation Group and became the Deputy Chief Medical Officer in February 2020 following the response to the Summer 2019-2020 bushfires.
Prior to these appointments, Professor Kelly spent 8 years as Chief Health Officer for the Australian Capital Territory and Deputy Director-General of Population Health in the ACT Government Health Directorate.

Professor Kelly has previously worked in research, health systems development, post-graduate teaching and as a health service executive including Director of the Masters of Applied Epidemiology Program at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University (ANU), and in the Northern Territory working as a Principal Research Fellow with the Menzies School of Health Research, as well as with the Centre for Disease Control in the NT Department of Health. Professor Kelly has worked in parts of Australia as well as Malawi, Indonesia, East Timor, and the UK.

Professor Kelly has over 30 years research experience and has published over 120 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He has supervised or mentored many trainees and post-graduate students and delivered lectures, workshops, seminars and conference talks nationally and internationally.

Professor Kelly is the Chair of the Australian Health Protection Principle Committee (AHPPC) and as an official member of National Cabinet, has contributed his extensive public health and epidemiological knowledge and experience in the formulation of various plans and advice relating to COVID-19. This has included the publication of statements and guidelines across a wide range of COVID-19 issues including incoming and outgoing travel particularly regarding infection prevention and control at Australia’s borders, aged care, hotel quarantine, public health measures such as social distancing and hygiene and the application of restrictions in response to community cases of COVID-19. This vital work has significantly contributed to Australia’s approach to virus suppression.

Rob Edwards has a Bachelor of Science with majors in Anatomy & Physiology. He has been a company director for 20 years in the health and well-being industry where he designed and delivered staff development programs for hundreds of organisations.

Prior to that he worked for five years in a cardiac rehabilitation program where he wrote the internationally distributed book Better Blood Pressure.

He has diverse experience working with people at all levels of business, cardiac patients, young offenders, elite athletes and remote island communities.

Rob received an Order of Australia Medal this year for his charity work.  He founded Its Time Foundation that installs solar power in remote Pacific island schools so, those kids can have a modern education. He also founded Plastic Free Oceans and the Sustainable Social platform.

Rob’s focus is simply to encourage people to take a brief time out in their busy lives to consider their most important asset - themselves.  And to get you thinking about sustainable actions that you can do so you have a long and high quality life.
We can’t look after other people unless we look after ourselves first.  That’s why the session is called “It’s All About You”.

Dr Ben Hamer is one of Australia's leading work futurists. He is the Future of Work Lead at PwC Australia and, in this capacity, spent time seconded to the World Economic Forum heading up critical projects on the future of work, skills, and education. Ben also leads PwC's health workforce capability and was an advisor during the pandemic to the NSW State Health Emergency Operations Center. 

In addition, Ben is a Board Member for the Australian HR Institute, recently appointed as the youngest Non-Executive Director in the organisation’s history.

Ben has a Doctorate of Public Administration, which included time spent as a Visiting Scholar at Yale University, and is an Adjunct Fellow with the Centre for the New Workforce at Swinburne University. Ben regularly features on across Australian media providing expert commentary on the Future of Work.

Plenary Facilitator & Workshop presenter

Dr Norman Swan is Australia’s most respected health journalist, broadcaster and commentator.

He hosts RN’s Health Report and since the COVID-19 pandemic, co-hosted Coronacast, a daily podcast on the coronavirus.

He is also a reporter and commentator on the ABC’s 7.30, Midday, News Breakfast and Four Corners and a guest host on RN Breakfast. 

He is a past winner of the Gold Walkley and has won other Walkleys including one in 2020. He was awarded the medal of the Australian Academy of Science and has an honorary MD from the University of Sydney.

He created Invisible Enemies, on pandemics and civilisation for Channel 4 UK and broadcast in 27 countries. He trained in medicine and paediatrics in Aberdeen, London and Sydney before joining the ABC.

Panel members

Professor Harlene Hayne CNZM
Vice‐Chancellor, Curtin University

Professor Harlene Hayne is Vice‐Chancellor of Curtin University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and of the Association for Psychological Science. In 2009 she was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to scientific and medical research. In 2022 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of her outstanding services to health and wellbeing. In 2012 she received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Colorado College, USA, and in 2021 she received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Otago where she had been the Vice‐Chancellor since 2011.

Professor Hayne arrived in Western Australia in April 2021 to take up the role of Vice‐Chancellor at Curtin University. She was recently appointed as an honorary Governor of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia (AmCham), a Director of the Western Australian Health Translation Network (WAHTN) Executive Board, a member of Chief Executive Women (CEW), and a member of the Scotch College Council.

Originally from the United States, Professor Hayne received a Bachelor of Arts from Colorado College, and a Master of Science and PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience from Rutgers University. She spent three years as a post‐doctoral fellow at Princeton before joining the University of Otago in 1992. She subsequently served as Head of the Psychology Department and as Deputy Vice‐Chancellor Research and Enterprise before being appointed as Vice‐Chancellor.

During her tenure at Otago, Professor Hayne served on the Board of the New Zealand Treasury, she was the Chair of Fulbright New Zealand, she was an expert panel member for the Tamaki Regeneration Project, she was a member of the New Zealand National Science Panel, and she was the Co‐Chair of Office of the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Committee Working Party on Reducing Social and Psychological Morbidity during Adolescence. Professor Hayne is also the Co‐Director of the Innocence Project New Zealand; she recently provided expert testimony in a case of miscarriage of justice before the New Zealand Supreme Court.

Professor Hayne has been awarded continuous research funding since 1992. She continues to conduct research and she has published widely in the areas of memory development and adolescent risk taking. She has supervised numerous PhD, masters and undergraduate honours theses. She is an Associate Editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest and of Memory, and is a member of the Editorial Board of Infant Behaviour and Development and of Developmental Psychobiology.

Dale Fisher
Chief Executive Officer, Silver Chain Group

Dale’s expertise in leading large-scale, innovative organisational transformation in the design and delivery of client-centred care is contributing to the modernisation of how Australians receive their health and aged care in the home. 

In December 2018, Dale was appointed CEO of Silver Chain Group, Australia’s largest in-home care specialist, providing complex health and aged care services to more than 105,000 clients a year and employing more than 4,400 people. With a national service offering, Silver Chain’s vision is to provide the world’s best health and aged care in the home so Australians can confidently live the lives they choose. 
 
Prior to joining Silver Chain Group, Dale was the CEO of Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, establishing Peter Mac as Australia’s largest cancer centre and a world leader in translational cancer research. Dale was also previously the CEO of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Victoria, where she re-established the identity of the Women’s as a standalone specialist hospital and was instrumental in creating the first Centre for Women’s Mental Health.
 
Dale is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at Monash University, and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University (Research).

In recognition of her achievements throughout three decades of leadership in health care, Dale is a member of Chief Executive Women, which represents Australia’s most senior and distinguished women leaders. Dale is also a board member of the Committee for Melbourne; has been inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll; and has been honoured as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. In 2021, Dale was appointed to the international Deloitte Human Services Innovators Council, and in 2020, the Advisory Council for the Western Australian Future Health Research and Innovation Fund. 

Dixie Marshall
Managing Director, Marketforce

Dixie is the Managing Director of WA’s oldest advertising agency, Marketforce.

She has more than 38 years’ experience in media, advertising, politics and communications across a range of platforms, including television, radio, newspapers, and digital. She has won awards for journalism, and more recently advertising. 

She is a former journalist and Channel 9 newsreader. Dixie was the first woman AFL boundary rider on Australian TV. She has covered international bombings, fraudsters, bikies, Olympic and Commonwealth Games. Dixie worked from the Premier’s Office for 7 years as the Director of Strategic Communications for the WA Government. 

Dixie is also a Commissioner of the WA Football Commission, and a Non-Executive Director of an ASX listed solar company.

Dixie is the first woman MD of a major advertising agency in WA’s history. Storytelling remains her passion and key expertise.

Learne Durrington
Chief Executive Officer,  WA Primary Health Alliance

Boasting a wealth of experience in the management of government and not-for-profit organisations, Learne Durrington has a reputation for driving innovation within and across the health and social care sectors.

Learne is passionate about achieving a connected and accessible health system that is patient and outcome focused.

As the CEO of WA Primary Health Alliance, Learne is leading the establishment of strategic alliances and partnerships across WA to support systemic change within the primary healthcare system.

Learne leads with the principle that good health outcomes can only be achieved through the combined effort of all levels of government, clinical and social care services together with private and public organisations.

Starting her career as a social worker, Learne has a Masters of Public Policy and is an Associate Professor of Health Sciences at Curtin University, a Fellow of the Australian College of Health Services Management and GAICD.

Liz MacLeod
Chief Executive, East Metropolitan Health Service WA (EMHS)

Liz MacLeod is the Chief Executive of the East Metropolitan Health Service (EMHS), a large organisation which provides health services to over 729,000 people in Perth’s east metropolitan region, as well as supports regional West Australians requiring complex care. 

As Chief Executive, Liz is responsible for managing a $1.75 billion annual budget and leads a team of more than 9,350 staff.

Having extensive experience in complex transformational change meant Liz had an integral role in establishing EMHS as a new statutory authority within the WA public sector in 2016 and has successfully guided EMHS to become one of the highest performing and innovative health service providers in WA. 

In addition, Liz continues to play a pivotal role in WA’s response to COVID-19, as the Chief Executive for COVID-19 Health Operations, where she leads the coordination and oversight of activities carried out by WA’s healthcare providers in response to the public health emergency.

Liz was recently recognised for her excellence in public service leadership when she was awarded the Leader of the Year working within a division, team or organisation at the 2021 Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) Achievement Awards. 

Prior to becoming the Chief Executive for EMHS, Liz was the Executive Director, Commissioning of Fiona Stanley Hospital where she had oversight and accountability for commissioning of the hospital. Liz has held senior leadership roles within WA Health during the past 10 years with particular experience in clinical planning and health service redevelopment.

With a background in physiotherapy and more than 20 years management experience in the health sector, Liz is passionate about the delivery of safe, high quality, consumer-centred care, financial performance and sustainability.

Michelle Fyfe APM
Chief Executive Officer, St John Ambulance WA

With over 38 years’ experience across government and community organisations, Michelle has an outstanding track record of driving successful business operations and enhancing corporate productivity.  Michelle is an assertive, action-orientated dynamic leader with a passion for leading organisational change.  Her demonstrated capacity to drive capability and responsiveness to provide maximum benefit for the community are evident in both her current and previous roles. 

Michelle joined St John Ambulance WA as the Chief Executive Officer in June 2018 after 34 years with Western Australia Police in many roles including Assistant Commissioner of State Crime.  St John WA delivers emergency ambulance services on behalf of the state of Western Australia across a geography of 2.5 million square kilometres, the largest ambulance jurisdiction in the world. 

Michelle has a number of academic qualifications including a Master of Leadership and Management. In 2017 Michelle received a Telstra Businesswomen’s Award in the ‘WA Public Sector and Academia’ category and was awarded the Australian Police Medal in 2012. 

In addition to her role as Chief Executive, Michelle is a Commissioner of the Western Australia Football Commission, a not-for-profit sports association that acts as the caretaker of Australian Rules Football throughout the State of Western Australia, and a Non-executive Director of Parkerville Youth and Care Inc. supporting vulnerable children, young people, adults, and their families in WA.

Michelle is a versatile leader who excels at building relationships with individuals and organisations from diverse backgrounds. 

Rebecca Tomkinson
Chief Executive Officer, Royal Flying Doctor Service (Western Operations)

Rebecca Tomkinson is the Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Flying Doctor Service (Western Operations). Rebecca is deeply committed to the development of regional Western Australia – where she was raised and educated – and is actively involved in building community and business capability. She is the Chair of the Regional Development Council and Wheatbelt Development Commission, a Board member of Infrastructure WA, and the WA President of the CEDA State Advisory Board.

Professor Shirley Bowen
Chief Executive, North Metropolitan Health Service WA

Professor Bowen was Dean, School of Medicine, Fremantle at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Prof Bowen is a Physician and holds dual Fellowships in Infectious Diseases (FRACP) and Sexual Health medicine (FAChSHM).   
Prof Bowen has more than 20 years' experience in Executive management of Hospitals and Public Health, starting her management career as the Chief Medical Officer of the ACT. She has also held the position of Director of Communicable Diseases for Western Australia. 

Prof Bowen has a passion for excellent patient care and is committed to visible and authentic leadership.