Elsie Blay

General Manager, Housing and Homelessness
Ruah Community Services
Bachelor of Nursing 2009

Tell us about your career since graduating.

Following my studies at Notre Dame, I completed a graduate program at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in cardiothoracic and then in oncology and haematology.

After this, I wanted to continue to show the passion and excitement the Notre Dame nursing practicals had brought out in me. This resulted in many travels to Timor, India, Uganda and the USA. I then studied biomedicine and did a Master's in Public Health, focussing on health economics.

From this work what stood out was that people are complex, and I found the intersection between their lives and their health most fascinating. Whether in a small village in Timor or a pumping emergency department, people need the same things to be connected. Early on, I was drawn to the root cause of ill-health and social inequity.

I went into roles focussing on service model design and implementation, health project management, academia, and some consulting work before landing with Ruah. I worked in project management in health across Australia, implementing exciting new projects in community health and acute care. When my kids were born, I did some lecturing at uni and tutored in health ethics and governance. I loved that and being able to work with energetic and thriving students!

I have worked with Ruah for five years in a range of roles. I began consulting, then moved into service design, project management and led our strategy and projects portfolio. I am now loving a more operations focused role, working in our housing and homelessness team.

Tell us about your role now.

As the General Manager at Ruah, I am outward focused on strategy and looking at how we can continually extend our offering to the people we support. I oversee our dynamic and thriving operations team. We have a wide range of outreach services, engagement hubs and drop spaces. We support people where they are at. My role is focused on leading the strategy for the team and working to ensure we deliver the best possible service to the people who need it most. My role focuses on designing and implementing new services, governance, business development, future business planning and partnerships within the sector.

While not on the front line, I am working every day to fight for people who experience social inequity and co-morbidities. The people my team support have multiple and complex health needs. I was drawn to solve upstream solutions from working in an emergency department and seeing the multiple challenges people experience in navigating their physical health. When people come into acute care, there is often much behind it, which is where the real work begins.

I was really motivated from my years in nursing to bridge the gap between research and practice. Being able to work with incredible teams who use research findings to inform policymakers and influence policy development and implementation has been incredibly rewarding.

My initial motivation to move into the policy space was to advocate and lead the community services sector to develop holistic, wrap-around support services designed to address the complex drivers of homelessness and meet the needs of those experiencing, or at risk of becoming homeless. I really love what I am doing!

What interested you about pursuing a career in public health?

My early student and then graduate experiences sparked an interest in becoming involved in public health. The impact that things like sanitisation had on community health and the many systemic barriers to health care and education I saw across my early clinical experiences, had a major effect on me. As a team we would assess and treat people, but we could often only resolve the surface issues. Understanding that the issues are often far more complex and then working out what is needed to create change, helps to address health inequity. These experiences were the catalyst for my decision to move into public health.

What would you consider to be the greatest achievement of your career?

Definitely leading a brilliant team. Seeing people grow and succeed is so rewarding. Being in a role where we can support people to create real change feels like an achievement when they have a win. Leading a team that does such important work - to reassess our assumptions about why people find themselves in disadvantaged situations. This problem is not a them problem, but an us problem. As a society, we need to do better and work together across all sectors to better address the inequalities in health and social disadvantage.

What is one recent career highlight?

Being a leader through COVID-19 has stood out as a highlight. The importance of looking after our teams and prioritising people really hit home. When the teams were under incredible pressure from the unknown, what mattered most was all of us working with empathy and engaging with people to understand their concerns. It gave real clarity to understand what matters most for our staff and the people we support. Giving some sense of certainty was really important during what we were expecting to be a huge crisis in the sector.

There was never a greater need to be more responsive and fluid to the dynamics of an evolving crisis. We were supporting people who had no way to isolate, no transport and were often unsure of what they needed to be doing to stay safe. People were really scared. It was incredibly rewarding to be able to plan and work with the sector and our teams to ensure the community was safe and as prepared as we could be. Looking back, this experience gave me a lot of perspective.

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