Reflections on Leadership & Midwifery

01 Jun 2026

As Australia marks International Day of the Midwife this May, we spoke with Karrie Long, former Victorian Chief Nurse and Midwifery Officer at Safer Care Victoria, about leadership, reform, resilience and the evolving role of nursing and midwifery in shaping the future of healthcare.

Having recently concluded her term as Victoria’s Chief Nurse and Midwifery Officer, Karrie reflects on a distinguished career spanning clinical care, research, digital health, workforce reform, executive leadership and public service. Throughout that journey, she has championed collaboration across professions, sectors and systems to tackle some of healthcare’s most complex challenges.

In this conversation, Karrie shares the experiences that shaped her leadership, her reflections on resilience and workforce sustainability, and the advice she hopes the next generation of nurses, midwives and healthcare leaders will carry forward.

Looking back across your career, what moments or experiences shaped you most as a leader?

What has shaped me most as a leader is the breadth, variety and contrast of my career.

Building my career in rural and regional health services exposed me to a remarkable range of roles, responsibilities, opportunities and challenges that I would not have encountered in metropolitan settings. In those environments, leadership is not about hierarchy; it must be genuinely multidisciplinary and grounded in strong relationships, creativity, adaptability and broad capability. You learn to respond quickly, step forward when action is needed, and lead even when resources are limited.

There is also a deep sense of lived accountability in serving the community where you live and work. It is both a privilege and a powerful motivator to deliver the best possible care.

As a single mother and a deeply curious thinker, my career evolved across clinical care, research, digital health, workforce reform, executive and board leadership, and public service. That breadth of experience strengthened my systems thinking and enabled me to help design and deliver large-scale digital transformation, while leading statewide and national work across complex health system issues. I have always been interested in how we bring people together differently — across professions, sectors and systems — to solve problems that are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected.

COVID was also enormously formative. Working in a large metropolitan health service in Melbourne, I saw executive leadership at its best as leaders were asked to create new services and implement change at a pace healthcare had never experienced before. It reinforced for me that leadership in uncertainty is less about control and more about talent, trust and distributed leadership. That remains one of my most important lessons from the pandemic, and one I believe we should continue to build on.

International Day of the Midwife is an important moment of recognition. What message would you most want midwives across Australia to hear right now?

I want midwives across Australia to know that their contribution is extraordinary and that their impact extends far beyond each episode of care. Midwives help shape healthier families and communities, and the effects of that work are felt across generations.

Midwives are present at some of the most important moments in people’s lives. Their work uniquely combines clinical expertise, advocacy, public health, continuity of care and deep human connection.

What I have always admired about midwifery is its strong commitment to person-centred care and partnership. Long before the broader health system began speaking about holistic and consumer-centred care, midwives were already practising it every day.

This is also a pivotal moment for women’s and reproductive health in Australia, and a time for the broader health system to listen to and stand beside midwives — recognising not only the complexity and expertise of the profession, but also the leadership midwives bring to conversations about safety, equity, prevention and the future of healthcare.

What has healthcare leadership taught you personally about resilience, purpose and perspective?

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on what resilience really means in healthcare. We know there has been little time to recover since COVID, and we are now facing additional geopolitical, financial and health pressures. At this critical point, I think we need to look more deeply at resilience in relation to both healthcare systems and the workforce.

Too often, resilience is framed as simply hardening up, getting stronger and pushing through. I think we need to challenge that idea. Instead, we should be asking what safe and sustainable capacity looks like for our workforce, and how we build systems that do not ask more of people than is reasonable if we want them to do their important work well.

We also need to support healthcare workers who are deeply driven and motivated by care to understand their limits, and to work in ways that allow them to be both excellent clinicians and balanced human beings.

Personally, that has been a hard-earned lesson. I would like to see a future workforce that does not need to experience a critical event 25 years into a career to realise there is a healthier and more sustainable way to work and live.

If you could leave one lasting message for the next generation of nurses, midwives and healthcare executives, what would it be?

One of the biggest influences on my career has been the people who opened doors for me along the way preceptors, managers, colleagues, executives, academics and leaders from many disciplines who invited me into projects, conversations and opportunities before I felt fully ready.

Their support shaped not only my confidence, but also the kind of leader I strive to be: someone who creates opportunities for others and sees leadership as something we build collectively.

This should be part of how we work at every level across healthcare because it is how we grow a stronger, smarter workforce for the future. When I walk through health services today, I am constantly struck by the talent, commitment and intelligence of younger clinicians. I believe our task is not to control that workforce, but to harness its potential to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.