Dr Suzi Nou: A leadership perspective

After my provisional fellowship year, I landed a job as a senior lecturer at the Fiji National University.?My role was to run the anaesthesia training program for 14 doctors from across the Pacific; the largest cohort of anaesthesia trainees the university had ever taught.?Within a few months of arriving, the country went into ‘Emergency regulations’.?In a short period of time, we lost half of our six specialist anaesthetists and were down to only a few bottles of volatile agent.?During this time the Ministry of Health asked me to become the head of the department of anaesthesia and ICU, which I reluctantly accepted.?That time was difficult for me for many reasons, but I am proud that we were able to overcome supply issues and continue to deliver an anaesthetic service.

I am also proud that anaesthetic training continued. All the trainees passed their exams and by the end of my 18 months in the post, there were double the number of specialists involved in delivering the training, thanks to the generosity of volunteers from around the world.?

During a panel discussion a few years later, a colleague once said that women are perhaps too sensible to work overseas in developing countries.?Colleagues have also contacted me as they thought a published description of me as head of department must have been false.?Many people have assumed that I was based in Fiji for a short period of time and received financial support from the ASA.?I was and still am very grateful to the ASA for putting me in contact with the Fiji National University and keeping in touch with me while I was there.

However, I lived there for 18 months, was employed directly by the university, earned a local wage and arranged my own accommodation.?

During my masters of public health I learnt about the social and health gradient.?For example, in Scotland, male life expectancy decreases by two years for every station on the train line from Jordanhill in Glasgow. As I considered moving back to a large Australian city after years in the tropics, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a gender and ethnicity gradient of medical specialists from inner city tertiary hospitals to outer metropolitan community hospitals.?

There are less women in leadership roles, there is a gender pay gap in anaesthesia that persists after correcting for stage of career, hours worked, and proportion of on-call work undertaken.?These differences arise because of systemic issues. Women have access to different networks, are labelled differently and heard differently.

The Australian and New Zealand Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Initiative attempts to address some of these issues by involving men and women to support female and non-binary anaesthetists to identify their career goals and provide them with mentoring, coaching and possibly sponsorship as well as by broadening networks.?

In many of the significant roles I have had – president of the ASA, reservist in the Royal Australian Air Force, federal councillor of the AMA, starting a not-for-profit organisation to facilitate teaching projects in developing countries, it has been predominantly men who have nominated, encouraged and supported me.?No doubt these men are wonderful people. They are great leaders in our specialty who I greatly admire and respect. Yet I can’t help noticing that I’m surrounded by intelligent, hard-working, talented women who could and also want to hold leadership roles.?

My hope is that the profession is as inclusive as we are diverse and that this will be reflected in our leadership.?I believe WELI is a great step in this direction.