Helen Haines MP & Climate 200

Helen Haines has lived and worked as a nurse, midwife, health administrator and medical researcher in North East Victoria (Chiltern, Rutherglen and Wangaratta) for more than 32 years. She has committed her working life to the health, wellbeing and prosperity of communities across the North East.

Helen is a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, Department of Rural Health, Melbourne Medical School, Director of the Rural Health Academic Network (RHAN) and Executive Director of the Education and Research Unit at Northeast Health Wangaratta.

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She grew up with her four brothers on the family dairy farm at Eurack, 30 kilometres north of Colac, on the edge of Victoria’s Western Plains. Helen attended Eurack state primary school, a one-teacher school where enrolments rarely exceeded 12 students. After completing year 12 at Trinity College, Colac, where she was school captain, Helen followed in the footsteps of her aunts and trained as a registered nurse at St Vincent’s Hospital and later as a midwife at the Mercy Maternity Hospital in Melbourne. She gave the valedictory speech for both graduating classes.

On moving to North East Victoria in 1986, Helen began work as a midwife at the Wangaratta Base Hospital before being appointed as the youngest ever administrator and Director of Nursing at the Chiltern Bush Nursing Hospital. Helen continued her nurse education, obtaining a bachelor’s degree through distance study at Deakin University and later returned to Wangaratta Base Hospital as a midwife where she helped establish the Wangaratta Community Midwife Program. This pioneering program recently celebrated 20 years of service to women and families across the region.

Helen pursued an interest in epidemiology and public health through a master’s degree at the University of New South Wales which took her to Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2004. She later enrolled for her PhD at Uppsala University, completing a doctoral degree in Medical Science in 2012 and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, home of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. Her doctoral research work is now implemented in healthcare across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and Scandinavia.

Helen is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Alpine Valleys Community Leadership program. She is a board member of St Catherine’s Aged Care in Wangaratta and Indigo Power Community Energy Retailer. She is a former director of the Hume Medicare Local, former director, chair and now life member of Ovens and King (now Gateway) Community Health Service, and former board member and chair of Wangaratta Unlimited – Economic Advisory Board to the Rural City of Wangaratta.

Helen lives with her husband Phil on their small beef farm by the King River outside Wangaratta, where they raised their three children and for many years also ran a farmstay accommodation business.

https://www.helenhaines.org