Australia Day Honours 2024: Professor Kirsten Auret appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia

From her first rotation as a junior doctor in Perth, Professor Kirsten Auret found she loved the work done by the teams of people looking after patients in palliative care.

She loved it so much that she has now dedicated much of her career to it.

That dedication has led to her inclusion on this year’s Australia Day Honours list as one of the 194 new Members of the Order of Australia (AM).

Professor Auret said it came as a “complete surprise” when she was told about the honour.

“The only other person I know who has an Order of Australia is such an amazing mentor and friend, and such an amazing clinician that I didn’t really think I was in that same league,” she said.

Since 2000, Professor Auret has worked in a variety of roles largely focused on providing palliative care.

You don’t tend to use as many sophisticated tests, you tend your skills to help people with your heart and your mind and your hands rather than have another CAT scan or go for this blood test

She describes the speciality as “very human” with excellent teams of “compassionate, warm and wonderful” people that have kept her in the field.

“It’s kind and compassionate, but you also have to use all your skills to help without doing more than you should,” she said.

“You don’t tend to use as many sophisticated tests, you tend your skills to help people with your heart and your mind and your hands rather than have another CAT scan or go for this blood test.

“I really love that, I think it’s excellent medicine.”

She said palliative care often relied on building connections.

“It’s about who the person is and their family is, and a large part of what we do is to try to bring something of yourself to their care,” she said.

Professor Auret moved to Albany with her young family in 2008 after being appointed as a palliative care specialist by the WA Country Health Service.

This community just says ‘yes, lets try that’ and I think that is also part of being rural because people are much more aware of what can be done differently and who might help you do that

The appointment made her the first palliative care specialist to live and work outside of Perth, and it remained that way for almost a decade.

“When I arrived here, there was already a strong commitment in Albany to palliative care,” she said.

“At that stage, you have your wonderful hospice already and you had some amazing nurses and GPs who were already really committed to palliative care.”

She said the situation meant the community was open to doing things differently.

“As a teacher and a researcher, I might look at things and say we could do this differently if we give it a go,” she said.

“This community just says ‘yes, let’s try that’ and I think that is also part of being rural because people are much more aware of what can be done differently and who might help you do that.”

She said the focus of palliative was to provide the best quality of life and a dignified comfortable death as well as caring for the family.

“What has changed is that we’ve become better at looking after people’s symptoms,” she said.

“Palliative care has also become more integrated into care earlier, which means we see people while they are having chemotherapy or still on dialysis.

“We also see people who get sick quickly, they might have a big stroke and we’ll get called into the emergency department.”

Another big part of Professor Auret’s career has been her teaching work, primarily with the Rural Clinical School.

In that role, a lot of her time is focused on student doctors and encouraging them to be rural doctors.

“Whether they end up being a GP or some other kind of doctor, my tertiary work is primarily about getting them back to the country,” Professor Auret said.

“I don’t mind if it’s palliative or something else, but a lot of my work focuses on what we have to do to give student doctors the right training, the right experience, the right mentorship that they want to come back to the country to serve.”

Behind the scenes, Professor Auret is grateful for the support of her family including her husband Dr David Warren and their two daughters.

“Without them and their support, I would not have been able to achieve anything,” she said.

“They’ve always just made it possible for me to do what I feel needs to be done.

“They are a very loving base to go out from every day and then come home to.”