Leeona West

Leeona West is a proud Kalka­dun­ga/D­jaku-nde woman and reg­is­tered nurse with over 20 years of health­care lead­er­ship expe­ri­ence. She earned her Bach­e­lor of Nurs­ing in 2001 through a com­mu­ni­ty-based pro­gram on Kalakadoon Coun­try and was award­ed a CRANAplus Fel­low­ship in 2022.

Cur­rent­ly serv­ing as Adjunct Senior Lec­tur­er at both James Cook and Charles Dar­win Uni­ver­si­ties, Leeona spe­cialis­es in First Nations health­care lead­er­ship and con­sult­ing. Her notable roles include First Nations Nurs­ing and Mid­wifery Con­sul­tant for Queens­land Health’s Lead­er­ship Pro­gram, Direc­tor of Engage­ment for the Gov­ern­ment Cham­pi­on Pro­gram, and pre­vi­ous posi­tions as Direc­tor of Nurs­ing at Morn­ing­ton Island Hos­pi­tal and Direc­tor of Pri­ma­ry Health Care at Gidgee Healing.

Leeona brings exten­sive expe­ri­ence across gov­ern­ment, pri­ma­ry health­care, hos­pi­tal, emer­gency care, and com­mu­ni­ty sec­tors. Her work focus­es on imple­ment­ing qual­i­ty health­care stan­dards and improv­ing ser­vices for dis­ad­van­taged com­mu­ni­ties. She com­bines pro­fes­sion­al nurs­ing exper­tise with Cul­tur­al knowl­edge of know­ing, being, doing, and liv­ing to advance Indige­nous health­care out­comes and to make a mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tion to CRANAplus as a Board Director.