Orig­i­nal­ly from the north of Eng­land, Nick has spent more than 20 years in nurs­ing – a jour­ney that brought him to the oth­er side of the world. What began as a six-month stint in Broome turned into a 15-year com­mit­ment, and counting. 

The last five years have seen Nick work­ing for Kim­ber­ley Renal Ser­vices, a whol­ly-owned sub­sidiary of Kim­ber­ley Abo­rig­i­nal Med­ical Ser­vices, in a trans­plant coor­di­na­tion role that has now earned him this recog­ni­tion as Nurse/​Mid­wife of the Year. 

“You don’t get into health care for awards, but it’s pret­ty spe­cial when it hap­pens,” Nick says. 

“There’s a huge team that I’m part of which is required to get any patients over the line for trans­plant, so to be recog­nised for my part with­in that team is great — it’s def­i­nite­ly a team win.”

In Nick’s role, he’s seen the chal­lenges faced when it comes to kid­ney disease.

“Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple are over­rep­re­sent­ed with­in kid­ney dis­ease, and then very much so with­in dial­y­sis,” he explains. 

“When they do even­tu­al­ly end up on dial­y­sis, that could be thou­sands of kilo­me­tres away from home. 

“It’s a real­ly insid­i­ous dis­ease. It real­ly just creeps up on peo­ple and affects their whole life. It takes them away from fam­i­ly, takes them away from com­mu­ni­ty and jobs, chil­dren, everything.”

Receiv­ing a trans­plant can be a tick­et back to com­mu­ni­ty and some sense of nor­mal­i­ty, but many bar­ri­ers have made this process more complicated.

“Going back a few years, we real­ly weren’t doing any trans­plants in the Kim­ber­ley,” Nick explains. 

“There are sev­er­al bar­ri­ers that we faced with that. One of them was we were not iden­ti­fy­ing patients as suit­able trans­plant can­di­dates ear­ly enough … and then oth­er things like the edu­ca­tion pro­gram we had wasn’t great for our patients.” 

“On top of all of this, you’ve got our Abo­rig­i­nal patients that are engaged in this sys­tem that isn’t real­ly designed for them.” 

In 2020, Nick began work­ing as trans­plant coor­di­na­tor for the Kim­ber­ley Renal Ser­vices, and the team start­ed review­ing their process­es to find ways to break down those bar­ri­ers and improve out­comes for the community. 

“We start­ed get­ting patients seen with­in the first three months of start­ing dial­y­sis, or even in the pre-dial­y­sis peri­od, so that we could iden­ti­fy them as good can­di­dates, or if they had bar­ri­ers, we could push in the right direc­tion to address those,” he says. 

“One of our main bar­ri­ers is smok­ing, so we try and get peo­ple engaged with local ser­vices to help them stop. 

“We also brought coor­di­na­tion back to the Kim­ber­ley, so we’re able to reach out to local stake­hold­ers and have good rela­tion­ships with them where they under­stand their part in the process for our patients.

“Our patients tend to have sev­er­al co-mor­bidi­ties as well, so see­ing spe­cial­ist ser­vices is anoth­er bar­ri­er. Rural­ly, we get real­ly good spe­cial­ist ser­vices com­ing up, but we just don’t get them that fre­quent­ly. Some of our patients are hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters away and we’ve got to get them into a local cen­tre, so we try to address that by group­ing appointments.”

All of these things have come togeth­er to see a great improve­ment, both in patients being iden­ti­fied for kid­ney trans­plants and then in being sup­port­ed afterwards. 

“When patients come back, we want those kid­neys to last a long time, and it real­ly does mat­ter how they’re sup­port­ed back with­in the local community.” 

Patients who have received trans­plants now return to help edu­cate oth­ers going through the same process, some­thing Nick says is cre­at­ing real hope and motivation. 

“I can go and do an edu­ca­tion ses­sion and talk for hours, but there are guys that have actu­al­ly been through and had the trans­plant from that local area, so that real­ly res­onates with the patients.” 

“It’s not an easy process, so to have some­body sat next to them that might have been dial­ysed six months ago real­ly gives them hope that they can do it as well.” 

After see­ing the life-chang­ing impact of trans­plan­ta­tion, Nick hopes he can encour­age more peo­ple to get checked. 

“For peo­ple out there who haven’t been test­ed for chron­ic kid­ney dis­ease, it’s just worth engag­ing and mak­ing sure that you haven’t got any issues, because it is a silent dis­ease, espe­cial­ly for our Abo­rig­i­nal patients.”