Confidential coaching for senior clinicians navigating people issues, politics and high-stakes decisions in health services.
For situations where the challenge isn’t clinical judgement. It’s working out what is right for you, and how to move without making things worse.
Based in Melbourne, working across Australia and internationally.
In senior clinical roles, decisions are rarely just clinical.
What you raise, who you involve, and when you move all affect how you’re seen, what support you get next, and what becomes possible in your role.
Senior clinicians operate in environments where decisions are rarely simple, even when the clinical issues are clear. You’re dealing with strong personalities, professional hierarchies, committees, complaints processes, workforce pressure and constant scrutiny.
Most of the time, you can see several viable ways forward. The difficulty is choosing how to act: what to raise, who to involve, when to push and when to hold back. The wrong move doesn’t usually blow things up immediately. It creates friction, hardens positions or closes off options you may need later.
This work is about navigating the people, politics and consequences that come with the clinical role. The people you work alongside today may be assessing you, appointing you or referring to you tomorrow.
Senior clinicians usually come to me when they’re dealing with situations that won’t resolve themselves and can’t be worked through internally without consequences.
They typically know three things:
They know what the issues are.
They have options.
They want help deciding what is right for them, and how to move without making things worse.
That might include:
The work focuses on judgement, timing, and positioning in decisions where the stakes are high and the consequences aren’t always obvious upfront.
The risk is in letting a situation settle in a way that limits your future options.
Doctors often reach out at particular moments: when they’re stepping into a more senior role, being asked to act or lead without much preparation, or starting to position themselves for a director or head-of-unit role.
The clinical work is familiar. The leadership exposure, scrutiny and people management are not. This is often when small misreads carry bigger consequences for how you’re seen and what becomes possible next in your career.
I work with senior clinicians who want a confidential, external thinking space with someone who understands health services, but isn’t embedded in their organisation.
Many have already spent months thinking through a situation alone, trying to read the politics, work out the right move. By the time they reach out, they know the situation won’t resolve itself and delaying further just narrows their options.
This is a place to think clearly about situations where people, hierarchy, and reputation matter as much as formal process.
I’m an organisational psychologist with 25+ years’ experience working with senior professionals in health and other complex environments.
You become more deliberate about how you move.
You spend less time second-guessing decisions after the fact. You’re clearer about which issues are yours to carry, and which aren’t. You handle difficult situations with less spillover into your sleep, your relationships, or your sense of professional confidence.
Some doctors come to work through a specific situation. Others continue because the quality of their judgement improves, and the cost of getting it wrong — to their energy, their options, or their career — feels too high to leave to chance.
The work happens through regular, confidential one-to-one conversations focused on live situations that matter to you.
We slow things down just enough to examine what’s influencing the situation: the people involved, the power dynamics, the timing, and your own role in it.
My role is to test your read of what’s happening, surface what you may be missing, and help you think through the implications of different moves before you commit to one. The value isn’t only in what you do next, but in avoiding actions that create more problems than they solve.
If this is the kind of thinking space you’re looking for, you can schedule a conversation here.
I’ve delivered more than 7,400 one-to-one sessions over 25+ years, working with senior doctors, clinical leaders and executives across public and private medicine. I also provide executive coaching to leaders across various industries.
I have a PhD in organisational psychology, am a registered psychologist with formal training in business and counselling psychology. I have published research on leadership in Victorian public hospitals.
The first conversation is about understanding what you’re dealing with and whether it makes sense to work together.
It’s confidential, 30 minutes and there’s no obligation to continue.
Many doctors aren’t certain this is what they need when they first reach out. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
Either way, you’ll leave that first conversation clearer about what you’re dealing with, even if we don’t decide to work together.
