September 9, 2020
by Sharon Wall
Sandra Forster and us: Health & Ageing, Research, our First People, a lifetime of love.
By Prof. Tony Broe; AAG President 2003 – 2006 & founding Friend of ATSIAGG.
Sandra came into my life like a whirlwind over 40 years ago. She took over as Personal Assistant and as administration officer of the Department of Neurosciences at Lidcombe Hospital - in 1978. Sandra was 32 years old, married to her husband Chris for 9 years and she arrived with two young kids in tow, Sharelle and Derryn, and all the confidence in the world.
For 40 years Sandra and I have worked, fund-raised and socialised together across Sydney - from the far reaches of the Western Suburbs – Penrith, Campbelltown, Liverpool, Mt Druitt, Auburn, Lidcombe, Bankstown, Parramatta and Westmead – then South East Region – Randwick-Botany and Inner City Waverley Woollahra, Sutherland, St George, Wollongong. We were based initially at Lidcombe and then Concord Hospitals within the University of Sydney - for over 20 years; then in South East Health at Prince of Wales Hospital and NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia) within the University of NSW - for another 20 years – although we had only planned a five-year post-retirement stay.
Aboriginal Health and ageing
The stand-out focus of our time together, particularly after the move to UNSW, was developing the Aboriginal Health and Ageing program and team. On settling into South East Health in the year 2000 – coincidentally the end of the millennium and two centuries post the invasion site at La Perouse - we found that our new Program of Community Health and Aged Care was responsible for the Mainstream Health Care of the Aboriginal people of La Perouse and surrounding areas. Aboriginal Health had been neglected by Prince of Wales Hospital, particularly since the closure of Prince Henry Hospital in the 1990s. The Prince Henry Hospital had not only been a local Health Centre, but also where many members of the local Aboriginal community of 2500 people were employed. With Gail Daylight, Chicka Dixon and the Aboriginal Health-Link advisory group - we developed community services and later research in Aboriginal Health and Ageing; first with the La Perouse Randwick Botany community, later with Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation and Medical Service in Western Sydney, and with the Mid-North Coast Aboriginal communities – the Dunghatti people in Kempsey and Nambucca and the Gumbaynggir people around Coffs Harbour – Sandra was integral to our twenty years collaboration with these communities.
Over the forty year period of her involvement in Health Care and Research - Sandra took on many other support roles; in Ageing, within the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG); in Rehabilitation Services (virtually neglected in Western Sydney); and the new rehabilitation services we developed together - Dementia Care with Sid Williams; Community Health with Elias Imperial; Sydney’s first Neuropsychology Department with Robyn Tate, Skye McDonald and Wayne Reid; Head Injury Rehabilitation; Stroke Rehabilitation; and Neurosurgery with John Matheson. We progressed into studies on how the Brain and the Life-course determine the way we humans grow old successfully and the inability to close the lifespan gap for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples following Colonisation.
Lidcombe - Where it all began
Lidcombe Hospital and Home for the Indigent:
“The Old Men’s Home” had come a long way since a bunch of young conscripted medical officers - Gary Andrews, Nick Carter, Ted Cullen and yours truly - arrived in the 1960s - bringing radical change, admitting women, setting up the Western Sydney Health Region, developing multiple health services for the west and being voted the top teaching hospital of the University of Sydney by the 1970s. Collectively we had led the development of the NSW (then Australian) Association of Gerontology with Arthur Everitt, Geoff Hughes and Dick Lefroy and of the specialty of Geriatric Medicine in NSW with Dr Sid Sax before forming the Australian Geriatric Society.
Sandra’s takeover at Lidcombe Hospital was in 1978; this was organised by my retiring secretary, Lorraine Moodie. Lorraine was a physically small but fiercely determined left-wing feminist in the local Bankstown area; her life centred on Revesby Workers Club, Padstow and Panania. Lorraine was also a Labour Party stalwart and feminist. Her Hero was East Sydney Labour aficionado Eddie Ward. Sandra was tall, blonde, vivacious, unstoppable and very non-political – but incredibly efficient and determined at any job - with the life-skills to match. Her home base was also Padstow Panania and Bankstown however her Hero was right wing shock jock Alan Jones: I had to learn to wear this - as he became one of Sandra’s major supporters and research fundraisers.
I well remember the day I met Sandra in 1978: she exploded into my office in Lidcombe Hospital’s Neurology Service and Head Injury Unit. I was overwhelmed by this blonde bombshell who proceeded to take over my life and the Department. Sandra had started her working life on the switch at Bankstown Hospital and was fresh out of running a local Service Station in Riverwood for five years - with her husband Chris - then running the Mothers Group and the school tuck shop at Padstow Primary with Jill Groth and the local mothers. Sandra brought with her an amazing set of life and work skills as well as local contacts and connections, including the other Padstow mothers who became famous as “The Padstow Mafia” when they became a collective workforce at Concord Hospital from 1985.
Sandra at Lidcombe Hospital and the Western Health Region
Lidcombe Hospital services and research - with Sandra’s dynamic energy supporting Nick Carter’s executive team - brought modern neuroscience, health care, geriatric rehabilitation and dementia research to the neglected Western Region of Sydney with a series of services, many new to NSW Health:
Sandra at Concord Hospital, CERA, The Central Health Region The first big job at Concord was to get Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) funding for University teaching and research - setting up The Centre for Education and Research on Ageing (CERA). This meant getting funding for Sandra as University Administration Officer and also for other Lidcombers - Helen Creasy as Senior Lecturer; Wayne Reid as Neuropsychologist, Agnes Kainer as Registrar. John Cullen returned to Concord fresh from his training in Geriatrics at Westmead, as the man of the future. Sandra came across from Lidcombe bringing the Padstow Primary School mothers to staff our CERA Administration.
These were Sandra’s Queen Bee Years. Concord was a Commonwealth Repatriation Hospital. The DVA - Department of Veterans Affairs - supported us, with John Cullen developing our Inner West Aged Care Assessment Team and its extensions across Central Sydney to Canterbury and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (which didn’t join the new world of Aged Care Services until the 1990s). By then Concord Hospital had become a General Teaching Hospital and the 120,000 ageing Veterans in NSW were allowed to link with the 27 NSW Geriatric Medicine Teams and ACAT systems we had developed - to their great benefit.
The DVA gave the University a 60 room Nurses Home - Sandra’s Beehive - where we set up CERA Research and rapidly filled all 60 rooms: firstly with Sandra’s Padstow Tuck Shop ladies as our Administrative staff - The Padstow Mafia - Jill Groth, Jan Pollard, Jan Koh and Carol Tappin; then research staff and PhD and Masters candidates and community research teams - led by Helen Creasey, Dave Grayson, Chris Shanley and Sharon Wall; with Louise Waite, Olivier Piguet, Hayley Bennett, Laura Ahmad, Bill Brooks – all funded by our NH&MRC Grants and the millions of dollars raised by Sandra, who charmed the DVA, the RSL, Rotary, and the local clubs. Her amazing fundraising was assisted by Helen Xerefos and the ALVA ladies. The donations and bequests poured in as Sandra ran vast fundraising functions where Jazz Giants Katie Dunbar and Susie Cruickshank sang their hearts out and Alan Jones talked his head off. We set up AARF - the Ageing and Alzheimers Research Foundation - which became one of the largest Foundations of the University of Sydney. Our research collaborators included Scot Henderson from the ANU, Jim Anthony from Johns Hopkins University and Jon Pynoos from the Andrus Gerontology Centre in Los Angeles who came to Concord, first for his sabbatical, then as AAG Travelling Fellow.
However, in 1999 I felt that all good things must come to an end and decided to retire from the University of Sydney after a 30-year teaching and research stint mostly run with/by Sandra.
Sandra at South East Health – Prince of Wales Hospital Trying to retire in my 60s without Sandra was not a good idea: learned helplessness had set in. The formal retirement lasted only 6 weeks when I leapt on an offer from Deb Green - CEO of South East Health Area - to become “Director of Community Health and Aged Care” for the local South East Region. Sandra held the fort at CERA in 1999 until the new Professor - David Le Couteur – arrived to take over during 2000, then she came to the East.
My new position as Director of Community Health and Aged Care at South East Health and POWH was part of the service Helen Felton and I had set up in the 1980s for Eastern Sydney, with Morrie Sainsbury. It had gone off the rails with internecine strife between its component parts. I accepted the offer to sort it out, with Elizabeth Koff’s help, contingent on bringing Sandra across from Concord as Administrative Officer and bringing other members of the Concord ageing research team to ‘NeuRA’ - so Olivier Piguet, Hayley Bennett, Bill Brooks and Wayne Reid came across with me around 2000 as part of a Neuroscience and Ageing Research Team. This time Sandra dug her heels in for months; POWH she felt was a drive too far for her from Padstow Heights. We solved that crisis by the opening of the Eastern Distributor and Tunnel and Sandra and I with new teams worked together for another 20 years.
In many ways for Sandra and myself South East Health, Prince of Wales Hospital and NeuRA were a re-run of what we had previously set up together; first in Western Sydney and then in the Inner West. In our first joint role in the 1970s for Western Sydney, based at Lidcombe, we had regionalised Western Sydney Community Health and Geriatric Medicine Services. From 1985 at Concord Hospital, with Aged Care Assessment Teams (ACATs) developed with Commonwealth DoHA, we regionalised Geriatric Services across the State. In the 1980s NSW Health had created four large Metropolitan Health Regions. In 1986 these were “areaised” into 18 Metropolitan Health Services - each based on one of our 18 Geriatric Service Divisions - and 9 regional NSW services.
However, when we arrived in South East Health in 2000 and took on POW Hospital Community Health and Aged Care we found the wheels had fallen off the organisational bus in the East - with continuing strife between its partners - Geriatricians, Hospital in the Home, Community Health Services and John Dwyer’s Professorial Unit. Kristen Mbothu (as the newly appointed Director of Community Health), Wendy Gardiner (as NUM), Elizabeth Koff (from Area Office), Sandra and myself were slowly able to resolve the problems in Community Health and Aged Care - with many senior staff changes involved. In all this chaos nothing fazed Sandra; she simply shrugged her shoulders, smiled and carried on regardless. Everybody involved in the complex system we managed respected her sanity, wisdom, unflappable cheerfulness and practical approach. POWH Geriatric Medicine and Randwick Botany Community Health flourished in terms of building programs, staffing levels, acute aged care and rehabilitation wards and new patient care teams.
Sandra and the AAG However, that was not all Sandra had to manage. Her life became more complicated when, after taking on the chaos in South East Health in 2000, I became President Elect of the AAG and then President from 2003 to 2006 – following on from the super-efficient Barbara Squires. Sandra had always been a big AAG supporter and I had been on the AAG Council for ten years while at Concord Hospital – a job I could never have done without Sandra’s back up and management. The AAG was then a voluntary self-help organisation with the Council and its members providing administrative and bureaucratic support and the membership fees funding a professional Event Organiser to run our major fundraiser and activity - the Annual General Meeting. Most of this voluntary work fell on the back of the AAG President and their staff members – in this case Sandra.
We could see that the AAG, as a voluntary organisation, was untenable if we were to become a professional operation (and if Sandra were to survive my next six years on the AAG Council). Fortunately, the AAG relationship with the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) was excellent and the advice we provided was appreciated by the DoHA bureaucracy – particularly Kevin Vasseroti, Mary Murnane the Undersecretary of Health, the senior bureaucracy generally and the then Minister for Ageing (Julie Bishop). To cut a long story short, with Sandra holding the fort at the Hospital - as she usually did – I spent a period in Canberra in 2004 documenting the AAG case for a paid Secretariat and for administrative funding to support AAG Committees. This detailed application was successful, with Kevin Vasserotti’s strong support, and the funds came to the AAG with no strings attached. DoHA funding included support for a full-time Executive Officer, a new AAG Student Committee, a new AAG Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ageing Committee (AAG/ATSIAC which became ATSIAGG in 2013) and the ongoing Richard Gibson Research Grant Committee. This funding has been maintained by DoHA since with the expectation of the AAG providing “frank and fearless” advice to the Commonwealth on population ageing in Australia.
In 2004-2005 the newly funded AAG secretariat was still based in the current President’s workplace and day job; it was therefore Sandra who organised office space and support for our newly selected AAG Executive Officer, Janet Angel, in the Prince of Wales Ageing Research Centre, (where Sandra was Administrative Officer as part of our 2000 agreement with South East Health and POW Hospital).
Sandra had her work cut out managing her new AAG support role in 2004-5 as chaotic events followed one another in rapid succession. The POW Ageing Research Centre was small and already packed with its research staff; managing the new AAG Executive Officer proved challenging; previous files were missing in action; lines of responsibility with the prior AAG Secretariat were untested; the new President elect was on sabbatical leave; yours truly, the AAG President, then required 5 month’s sick leave for major surgery – October 2005 to April 2006. The inimitable Immediate Past President – Barbara Squires - stepped into the breech, ran the Gold Coast Annual AAG Conference in November 2005 with the Conference Team, and Sandra continued to run the AAG Executive Office from POWH with her usual unflappable efficiency and sang-froid.The AAG Executive Office finally settled into another site after 2006 (Gary Andrews Centre for Ageing Studies) and life at the AAG continued to move along and advance – but was now well funded for its role.
In terms of her day job as Ageing Research Centre Administration Officer, Sandra continued to raise our profile with the local Aboriginal Community by making many friends; supporting our Aboriginal Health and Ageing Program; obtaining a major Will - Bequest which we were able to bring to NeuRA Aboriginal Health and Ageing and continue fundraising with Helen Xerefos, the ALVA ladies and the Grilliams (RW & JG) amongst many other supporters. She continued her support for AAG/ATSIAC with Sharon Wall - assisting our bi-annual ATSIAC Conference and our subsequent published reports until and beyond the long planned and successful handover to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and members as it developed into the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ageing Advisory Group to the AAG.
Sandra was made a Distinguished Member of the AAG in 2019 for her long term services and support, and was presented this award at the 2019 AAG Conference in Sydney accompanied by her now grown daughter Sharelle and looking as fashionable as ever.
Sandra at NeuRA Between 2000 and 2014 the POW Ageing Research Centre was split between the Hospital and the POW Medical Research Institute (which then became NeuRA). In 2014 Sandra and I retired from the Hospital to became NeuRA employees, transferring the Ageing Research Centre entirely to NeuRA - where we had set up the Aboriginal Health and Ageing Program and NH&MRC longitudinal Koori Growing Old Well Study, with our five NSW Aboriginal Partner Organisations and other collaborators, from 2008 to 2020.
The years from 2010 to 2020 were not easy ones for Sandra with the onset of debilitating Rheumatoid requiring medication and intermittent surgery - which was paralleled by my own health woes; so we both gradually reduced the workload, handed over the bulk of the fundraising and passed the management of the Aboriginal Health and Ageing Group, the Research Studies and the funds to Dr Kylie Radford – our hard working, long standing, wizard clinical neuropsychologist who became Team Leader and Director of the Program.
Despite her increasing physical difficulties Sandra continued to party with her girlfriends, travel to the Gold Coast, Hawaii, Byron Bay, trek into NeuRA weekly to keep us in order, and make sure our newly forming Group – Lifecycle and Longevity Research (still to be honoured and titled by the NeuRA bureaucracy) maintained its profile and defended its funding from the NeuRA management forces that were consuming our research bequest.
The end days came for Sandra - with dramatic and unexpected abruptness. Virtually out of the blue she was diagnosed, in Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital, with disabling, disseminated, untreatable lung cancer. After palliative hip radiotherapy she remained pain free and was transferred to Braeside Palliative Care Hospital for total physical care. It was a rapid and devastating loss for husband Chris, Sharelle, Derren; her grandchildren; her close family; her vast cohort of friends; the old KGOWS team; the many teams she had left behind from Lidcombe, Concord and POWH; and the new NeuRA research teams that had been recently assembled by Kylie for our ongoing ageing studies with the Aboriginal partner organisations.
Typical of Sandra she remained in total charge of her room at Braeside and ruled the roost peacefully and effectively from her hospital bed, until the end. Once again nothing fazed Sandra; she simply shrugged her shoulders as always, smiled and directed operations. Everybody involved in her Palliative Care and her visitors were blown away by her unflappable cheerfulness, her force of character, her love and her acceptance. This was despite the major physical disabilities which were managed with incredible love and support by Chris, her children, and the Braeside staff (led to our great pleasure by her colleague Wendy Gardiner - our ex-POW Community Health and Aged Care Nursing Unit Manager who was now Nursing Director at Braeside).
All our love Sandra.
Wherever you are up there I am sure you are still ruling the roost.
By Prof. Tony Broe; AAG President 2003 – 2006 & founding Friend of ATSIAGG.
Sandra came into my life like a whirlwind over 40 years ago. She took over as Personal Assistant and as administration officer of the Department of Neurosciences at Lidcombe Hospital - in 1978. Sandra was 32 years old, married to her husband Chris for 9 years and she arrived with two young kids in tow, Sharelle and Derryn, and all the confidence in the world.
For 40 years Sandra and I have worked, fund-raised and socialised together across Sydney - from the far reaches of the Western Suburbs – Penrith, Campbelltown, Liverpool, Mt Druitt, Auburn, Lidcombe, Bankstown, Parramatta and Westmead – then South East Region – Randwick-Botany and Inner City Waverley Woollahra, Sutherland, St George, Wollongong. We were based initially at Lidcombe and then Concord Hospitals within the University of Sydney - for over 20 years; then in South East Health at Prince of Wales Hospital and NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia) within the University of NSW - for another 20 years – although we had only planned a five-year post-retirement stay.
Aboriginal Health and ageing
The stand-out focus of our time together, particularly after the move to UNSW, was developing the Aboriginal Health and Ageing program and team. On settling into South East Health in the year 2000 – coincidentally the end of the millennium and two centuries post the invasion site at La Perouse - we found that our new Program of Community Health and Aged Care was responsible for the Mainstream Health Care of the Aboriginal people of La Perouse and surrounding areas. Aboriginal Health had been neglected by Prince of Wales Hospital, particularly since the closure of Prince Henry Hospital in the 1990s. The Prince Henry Hospital had not only been a local Health Centre, but also where many members of the local Aboriginal community of 2500 people were employed. With Gail Daylight, Chicka Dixon and the Aboriginal Health-Link advisory group - we developed community services and later research in Aboriginal Health and Ageing; first with the La Perouse Randwick Botany community, later with Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation and Medical Service in Western Sydney, and with the Mid-North Coast Aboriginal communities – the Dunghatti people in Kempsey and Nambucca and the Gumbaynggir people around Coffs Harbour – Sandra was integral to our twenty years collaboration with these communities.
Over the forty year period of her involvement in Health Care and Research - Sandra took on many other support roles; in Ageing, within the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG); in Rehabilitation Services (virtually neglected in Western Sydney); and the new rehabilitation services we developed together - Dementia Care with Sid Williams; Community Health with Elias Imperial; Sydney’s first Neuropsychology Department with Robyn Tate, Skye McDonald and Wayne Reid; Head Injury Rehabilitation; Stroke Rehabilitation; and Neurosurgery with John Matheson. We progressed into studies on how the Brain and the Life-course determine the way we humans grow old successfully and the inability to close the lifespan gap for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples following Colonisation.
Lidcombe - Where it all began
Lidcombe Hospital and Home for the Indigent:
“The Old Men’s Home” had come a long way since a bunch of young conscripted medical officers - Gary Andrews, Nick Carter, Ted Cullen and yours truly - arrived in the 1960s - bringing radical change, admitting women, setting up the Western Sydney Health Region, developing multiple health services for the west and being voted the top teaching hospital of the University of Sydney by the 1970s. Collectively we had led the development of the NSW (then Australian) Association of Gerontology with Arthur Everitt, Geoff Hughes and Dick Lefroy and of the specialty of Geriatric Medicine in NSW with Dr Sid Sax before forming the Australian Geriatric Society.
Sandra’s takeover at Lidcombe Hospital was in 1978; this was organised by my retiring secretary, Lorraine Moodie. Lorraine was a physically small but fiercely determined left-wing feminist in the local Bankstown area; her life centred on Revesby Workers Club, Padstow and Panania. Lorraine was also a Labour Party stalwart and feminist. Her Hero was East Sydney Labour aficionado Eddie Ward. Sandra was tall, blonde, vivacious, unstoppable and very non-political – but incredibly efficient and determined at any job - with the life-skills to match. Her home base was also Padstow Panania and Bankstown however her Hero was right wing shock jock Alan Jones: I had to learn to wear this - as he became one of Sandra’s major supporters and research fundraisers.
I well remember the day I met Sandra in 1978: she exploded into my office in Lidcombe Hospital’s Neurology Service and Head Injury Unit. I was overwhelmed by this blonde bombshell who proceeded to take over my life and the Department. Sandra had started her working life on the switch at Bankstown Hospital and was fresh out of running a local Service Station in Riverwood for five years - with her husband Chris - then running the Mothers Group and the school tuck shop at Padstow Primary with Jill Groth and the local mothers. Sandra brought with her an amazing set of life and work skills as well as local contacts and connections, including the other Padstow mothers who became famous as “The Padstow Mafia” when they became a collective workforce at Concord Hospital from 1985.
Sandra at Lidcombe Hospital and the Western Health Region
Lidcombe Hospital services and research - with Sandra’s dynamic energy supporting Nick Carter’s executive team - brought modern neuroscience, health care, geriatric rehabilitation and dementia research to the neglected Western Region of Sydney with a series of services, many new to NSW Health:
- First Head Injury Rehabilitation and Community Service
- First Community Health Service
- First Stroke Unit
- First Geriatric rehabilitation programs
- First General Hospital Old Age Psychiatry Unit
- The First Teaching Hospital
- Early Community Programs – Nursing with Sharon Wall and Marianne Cummins; Social work with Jeannie Rowe and Barbara Squires
- Sandra was integral to these developments - but particularly the Western Region Neuroscience Service. In her ‘spare time’ she was the Practice Manager at “17 Kitchener Parade Bankstown” where we ran our Neurology and Neurosurgery Service for the people of Western Sydney and where her kids Sharelle and Derryn came for after school care.
Sandra at Concord Hospital, CERA, The Central Health Region The first big job at Concord was to get Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) funding for University teaching and research - setting up The Centre for Education and Research on Ageing (CERA). This meant getting funding for Sandra as University Administration Officer and also for other Lidcombers - Helen Creasy as Senior Lecturer; Wayne Reid as Neuropsychologist, Agnes Kainer as Registrar. John Cullen returned to Concord fresh from his training in Geriatrics at Westmead, as the man of the future. Sandra came across from Lidcombe bringing the Padstow Primary School mothers to staff our CERA Administration.
These were Sandra’s Queen Bee Years. Concord was a Commonwealth Repatriation Hospital. The DVA - Department of Veterans Affairs - supported us, with John Cullen developing our Inner West Aged Care Assessment Team and its extensions across Central Sydney to Canterbury and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (which didn’t join the new world of Aged Care Services until the 1990s). By then Concord Hospital had become a General Teaching Hospital and the 120,000 ageing Veterans in NSW were allowed to link with the 27 NSW Geriatric Medicine Teams and ACAT systems we had developed - to their great benefit.
The DVA gave the University a 60 room Nurses Home - Sandra’s Beehive - where we set up CERA Research and rapidly filled all 60 rooms: firstly with Sandra’s Padstow Tuck Shop ladies as our Administrative staff - The Padstow Mafia - Jill Groth, Jan Pollard, Jan Koh and Carol Tappin; then research staff and PhD and Masters candidates and community research teams - led by Helen Creasey, Dave Grayson, Chris Shanley and Sharon Wall; with Louise Waite, Olivier Piguet, Hayley Bennett, Laura Ahmad, Bill Brooks – all funded by our NH&MRC Grants and the millions of dollars raised by Sandra, who charmed the DVA, the RSL, Rotary, and the local clubs. Her amazing fundraising was assisted by Helen Xerefos and the ALVA ladies. The donations and bequests poured in as Sandra ran vast fundraising functions where Jazz Giants Katie Dunbar and Susie Cruickshank sang their hearts out and Alan Jones talked his head off. We set up AARF - the Ageing and Alzheimers Research Foundation - which became one of the largest Foundations of the University of Sydney. Our research collaborators included Scot Henderson from the ANU, Jim Anthony from Johns Hopkins University and Jon Pynoos from the Andrus Gerontology Centre in Los Angeles who came to Concord, first for his sabbatical, then as AAG Travelling Fellow.
However, in 1999 I felt that all good things must come to an end and decided to retire from the University of Sydney after a 30-year teaching and research stint mostly run with/by Sandra.
Sandra at South East Health – Prince of Wales Hospital Trying to retire in my 60s without Sandra was not a good idea: learned helplessness had set in. The formal retirement lasted only 6 weeks when I leapt on an offer from Deb Green - CEO of South East Health Area - to become “Director of Community Health and Aged Care” for the local South East Region. Sandra held the fort at CERA in 1999 until the new Professor - David Le Couteur – arrived to take over during 2000, then she came to the East.
My new position as Director of Community Health and Aged Care at South East Health and POWH was part of the service Helen Felton and I had set up in the 1980s for Eastern Sydney, with Morrie Sainsbury. It had gone off the rails with internecine strife between its component parts. I accepted the offer to sort it out, with Elizabeth Koff’s help, contingent on bringing Sandra across from Concord as Administrative Officer and bringing other members of the Concord ageing research team to ‘NeuRA’ - so Olivier Piguet, Hayley Bennett, Bill Brooks and Wayne Reid came across with me around 2000 as part of a Neuroscience and Ageing Research Team. This time Sandra dug her heels in for months; POWH she felt was a drive too far for her from Padstow Heights. We solved that crisis by the opening of the Eastern Distributor and Tunnel and Sandra and I with new teams worked together for another 20 years.
In many ways for Sandra and myself South East Health, Prince of Wales Hospital and NeuRA were a re-run of what we had previously set up together; first in Western Sydney and then in the Inner West. In our first joint role in the 1970s for Western Sydney, based at Lidcombe, we had regionalised Western Sydney Community Health and Geriatric Medicine Services. From 1985 at Concord Hospital, with Aged Care Assessment Teams (ACATs) developed with Commonwealth DoHA, we regionalised Geriatric Services across the State. In the 1980s NSW Health had created four large Metropolitan Health Regions. In 1986 these were “areaised” into 18 Metropolitan Health Services - each based on one of our 18 Geriatric Service Divisions - and 9 regional NSW services.
However, when we arrived in South East Health in 2000 and took on POW Hospital Community Health and Aged Care we found the wheels had fallen off the organisational bus in the East - with continuing strife between its partners - Geriatricians, Hospital in the Home, Community Health Services and John Dwyer’s Professorial Unit. Kristen Mbothu (as the newly appointed Director of Community Health), Wendy Gardiner (as NUM), Elizabeth Koff (from Area Office), Sandra and myself were slowly able to resolve the problems in Community Health and Aged Care - with many senior staff changes involved. In all this chaos nothing fazed Sandra; she simply shrugged her shoulders, smiled and carried on regardless. Everybody involved in the complex system we managed respected her sanity, wisdom, unflappable cheerfulness and practical approach. POWH Geriatric Medicine and Randwick Botany Community Health flourished in terms of building programs, staffing levels, acute aged care and rehabilitation wards and new patient care teams.
Sandra and the AAG However, that was not all Sandra had to manage. Her life became more complicated when, after taking on the chaos in South East Health in 2000, I became President Elect of the AAG and then President from 2003 to 2006 – following on from the super-efficient Barbara Squires. Sandra had always been a big AAG supporter and I had been on the AAG Council for ten years while at Concord Hospital – a job I could never have done without Sandra’s back up and management. The AAG was then a voluntary self-help organisation with the Council and its members providing administrative and bureaucratic support and the membership fees funding a professional Event Organiser to run our major fundraiser and activity - the Annual General Meeting. Most of this voluntary work fell on the back of the AAG President and their staff members – in this case Sandra.
We could see that the AAG, as a voluntary organisation, was untenable if we were to become a professional operation (and if Sandra were to survive my next six years on the AAG Council). Fortunately, the AAG relationship with the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) was excellent and the advice we provided was appreciated by the DoHA bureaucracy – particularly Kevin Vasseroti, Mary Murnane the Undersecretary of Health, the senior bureaucracy generally and the then Minister for Ageing (Julie Bishop). To cut a long story short, with Sandra holding the fort at the Hospital - as she usually did – I spent a period in Canberra in 2004 documenting the AAG case for a paid Secretariat and for administrative funding to support AAG Committees. This detailed application was successful, with Kevin Vasserotti’s strong support, and the funds came to the AAG with no strings attached. DoHA funding included support for a full-time Executive Officer, a new AAG Student Committee, a new AAG Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ageing Committee (AAG/ATSIAC which became ATSIAGG in 2013) and the ongoing Richard Gibson Research Grant Committee. This funding has been maintained by DoHA since with the expectation of the AAG providing “frank and fearless” advice to the Commonwealth on population ageing in Australia.
In 2004-2005 the newly funded AAG secretariat was still based in the current President’s workplace and day job; it was therefore Sandra who organised office space and support for our newly selected AAG Executive Officer, Janet Angel, in the Prince of Wales Ageing Research Centre, (where Sandra was Administrative Officer as part of our 2000 agreement with South East Health and POW Hospital).
Sandra had her work cut out managing her new AAG support role in 2004-5 as chaotic events followed one another in rapid succession. The POW Ageing Research Centre was small and already packed with its research staff; managing the new AAG Executive Officer proved challenging; previous files were missing in action; lines of responsibility with the prior AAG Secretariat were untested; the new President elect was on sabbatical leave; yours truly, the AAG President, then required 5 month’s sick leave for major surgery – October 2005 to April 2006. The inimitable Immediate Past President – Barbara Squires - stepped into the breech, ran the Gold Coast Annual AAG Conference in November 2005 with the Conference Team, and Sandra continued to run the AAG Executive Office from POWH with her usual unflappable efficiency and sang-froid.The AAG Executive Office finally settled into another site after 2006 (Gary Andrews Centre for Ageing Studies) and life at the AAG continued to move along and advance – but was now well funded for its role.
In terms of her day job as Ageing Research Centre Administration Officer, Sandra continued to raise our profile with the local Aboriginal Community by making many friends; supporting our Aboriginal Health and Ageing Program; obtaining a major Will - Bequest which we were able to bring to NeuRA Aboriginal Health and Ageing and continue fundraising with Helen Xerefos, the ALVA ladies and the Grilliams (RW & JG) amongst many other supporters. She continued her support for AAG/ATSIAC with Sharon Wall - assisting our bi-annual ATSIAC Conference and our subsequent published reports until and beyond the long planned and successful handover to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and members as it developed into the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ageing Advisory Group to the AAG.
Sandra was made a Distinguished Member of the AAG in 2019 for her long term services and support, and was presented this award at the 2019 AAG Conference in Sydney accompanied by her now grown daughter Sharelle and looking as fashionable as ever.
Sandra at NeuRA Between 2000 and 2014 the POW Ageing Research Centre was split between the Hospital and the POW Medical Research Institute (which then became NeuRA). In 2014 Sandra and I retired from the Hospital to became NeuRA employees, transferring the Ageing Research Centre entirely to NeuRA - where we had set up the Aboriginal Health and Ageing Program and NH&MRC longitudinal Koori Growing Old Well Study, with our five NSW Aboriginal Partner Organisations and other collaborators, from 2008 to 2020.
The years from 2010 to 2020 were not easy ones for Sandra with the onset of debilitating Rheumatoid requiring medication and intermittent surgery - which was paralleled by my own health woes; so we both gradually reduced the workload, handed over the bulk of the fundraising and passed the management of the Aboriginal Health and Ageing Group, the Research Studies and the funds to Dr Kylie Radford – our hard working, long standing, wizard clinical neuropsychologist who became Team Leader and Director of the Program.
Despite her increasing physical difficulties Sandra continued to party with her girlfriends, travel to the Gold Coast, Hawaii, Byron Bay, trek into NeuRA weekly to keep us in order, and make sure our newly forming Group – Lifecycle and Longevity Research (still to be honoured and titled by the NeuRA bureaucracy) maintained its profile and defended its funding from the NeuRA management forces that were consuming our research bequest.
The end days came for Sandra - with dramatic and unexpected abruptness. Virtually out of the blue she was diagnosed, in Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital, with disabling, disseminated, untreatable lung cancer. After palliative hip radiotherapy she remained pain free and was transferred to Braeside Palliative Care Hospital for total physical care. It was a rapid and devastating loss for husband Chris, Sharelle, Derren; her grandchildren; her close family; her vast cohort of friends; the old KGOWS team; the many teams she had left behind from Lidcombe, Concord and POWH; and the new NeuRA research teams that had been recently assembled by Kylie for our ongoing ageing studies with the Aboriginal partner organisations.
Typical of Sandra she remained in total charge of her room at Braeside and ruled the roost peacefully and effectively from her hospital bed, until the end. Once again nothing fazed Sandra; she simply shrugged her shoulders as always, smiled and directed operations. Everybody involved in her Palliative Care and her visitors were blown away by her unflappable cheerfulness, her force of character, her love and her acceptance. This was despite the major physical disabilities which were managed with incredible love and support by Chris, her children, and the Braeside staff (led to our great pleasure by her colleague Wendy Gardiner - our ex-POW Community Health and Aged Care Nursing Unit Manager who was now Nursing Director at Braeside).
All our love Sandra.
Wherever you are up there I am sure you are still ruling the roost.