Local Boy to Lord Mayor | A Lifelong Commitment to Community
The first couple of weeks of October were huge for Dr Ross Kerridge. First, he was confirmed as Lord Mayor of the City of Newcastle, and then just a day later, on 3 October, he became a grandfather for the first time. The 14th of October was his last working day as a clinical anaesthetist at the John Hunter Hospital, and now the path is clear for a razor-sharp focus on community and bringing people together as the city’s new Lord Mayor.
Dr Kerridge grew up around Bar Beach and Cooks Hill and attended Newcastle Boys High School.
“My dad was an orthopaedic surgeon who moved here to Newcastle in 1947 from Sydney and fell in love with the place,” said Dr Kerridge.
“My grandfather was a merchant seaman who died early from multiple sclerosis. Mum grew up on a farm in the Blue Mountains.
“I grew up around the city. As a 9-year-oldI was a member of the Cooks Hill Nippers. I’m number four of six siblings. My family was very community-minded. My father spent fifty years in service to the community as a doctor, and we were involved in the Lions Club, the Scouts, and the Church – it was a strong theme in the family.”
Until recently, Dr Kerridge has enjoyed a long and illustrious career as a Senior Staff Specialist Anaesthetist at John Hunter Hospital and Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle.
“The fact that my dad was a doctor was almost enough to direct my path elsewhere. I was always passionate about science, though, and at one stage, I considered either teaching or what we would now call Environmental Science. Ironically, my proudest moment at school was a year seven Social Studies project on how I would redesign Newcastle, how I would imagine it in 20 years! The teacher was so impressed he read it to the class.”
Following his final exams at school, the young Ross Kerridge took a three-month job laboring at BHP Steelworks before beginning his studies in Medicine at Sydney University.
“Even the nerds like me could get a job at the BHP in those days,” said Dr Kerridge.
“I borrowed Mum and Dad’s car after my last exam, drove out to the BHP Steelworks, filled in a form and started two days later. It was a unique experience, and we certainly worked hard.
“I had a good time at university – it was the 1970s, after all! With youthful idealism, I joined the Labor Party at 18 and was in Blacktown when Gough Whitlam launched the 1974 election campaign. I was also at the Opera House in 1987 to hear Bob Hawke commit that no child should live in poverty. Times have changed and I parted from the Labor Party to be an independent. I see politics as a way to improve communities.
“After university, I moved on to the UK, where I had the opportunity to rediscover and reinvent myself. As part of this, I became fascinated with Anaesthetics and was good at it. It was like the lights went on in my brain; it felt good. My teachers told me it was what I should be doing. And in the end, it gave me a platform to make change and improve how things are done globally.”
It was while he was working at a London hospital that he encountered three significant problems in terms of patient care. One was the way in which patients in Intensive Care were treated when there was no chance of survival. The second was becoming aware of strictly hierarchical nursing protocols that prevented nursing staff from seeking help from the appropriate doctors because there was a chain of command that had to be followed. The third was the seemingly unnecessary early hospitalisation of patients for preoperative care. On his return to Australia, Dr Kerridge took up a position at Liverpool Hospital and set about applying his practical nature, no-nonsense approach and ability to see the sensible solutions to each of these issues.
“We developed a protocol for ‘Active Management of the Dying Patient’, based on accepting the inevitable and making the patient’s final hours as dignified and comfortable as possible. We changed the Cardiac Arrest protocol to allow the nurses on the ward to call for help for any sick patient when they were worried. The Cardiac Arrest Team became the ‘Medical Emergency Team’ (or ‘Rapid Response Team’), and the system has been picked up worldwide.
“And finally, we developed a new system for surgery (the Perioperative System), where we planned patient care, prepared them before admission, and then brought them into the hospital only an hour or two before surgery, making patients more comfortable, better prepared and saving money for the hospital system. I continued to work in this space from the John Hunter Hospital, and again, it’s been picked up globally and “Perioperative Medicine’ is becoming a new field of medicine.”
Dr Kerridge puts these extraordinary achievements down to “stating the bleeding obvious” and “being in the right place at the right time,” with a bit of luck thrown in.
"I decided not to go into private practice where I could have made a lot more money. It was much more fun working with all the crew at John Hunter Hospital."
But to understand Dr Kerridge’s desire to make positive change in his community more fully, there is one life experience that continues to profoundly influence him and his decisions.
“Then I had an accident in 1990 during a training exercise on the Careflight rescue helicopter. I was being winched into the helicopter when a short circuit cut the cable. I was about 40 feet above the ground and ‘failed to maintain separation from the terrain’. I suffered multiple life-threatening injuries, had two weeks in Intensive Care and six months in hospital, which gave me an interesting insight into the patient’s experience. But it also had a considerable effect on my life and the life of my family, especially my wife Marion.
“Marion was a talented teacher on the principal pathway when the accident happened. We had our first son, but with me in hospital for six months, if I was ever going to work again, something had to give. Marion became our rock, holding it all together for us, staying home. Eventually, we had our second son. Everything I have achieved has been built on our partnership.
"I delivered my final anaesthetic on the anniversary of my near death experience.
"Nearly losing my life made me realise how lucky I was to still be here, that I’m here for a purpose and that I need to make it worthwhile."
“I don’t want to waste my time. I love people, and everything I’ve ever done has been about community. As Lord Mayor of Newcastle, this next stage of my life is an extension of that. The City of Newcastle is my next patient and there may even be a sense of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ again.
“It’s about bringing the community together, getting the grassroots right, the infrastructure, the roads, the footpaths, the public toilets – they’re essential – not so much of the expensive vanity projects. Newcastle is built up of small villages and old mining towns with their own character and history. Let’s not lose that. Each village is a place where people could live their whole lives – let’s avoid the urban sprawl that Sydney suffers from.
“I want Newcastle to be a place where everyone feels respected and a part of the community and that their council is delivering for them personally. I want it to be non-elitist and for people to feel they have control over their lives. A place that can showcase to the world how to live as a great community. We’ve got the ideas; now we just need to bring the
people together.”
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