Ellen is a sustainability strategist with high-level skills and extensive experience in non-financial corporate reporting. She has specialist expertise in environmental, sustainability, carbon and greenhouse gas emissions and safety reporting and non-financial governance. Ellen has post-graduate qualifications in science (MSc.) and business administration (MBA) and is a certified environmental practitioner (CEnvP), a member of the Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand (MEIANZ) and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (MAICD).

She has been a community member of the Physiotherapy Council since 2021 and sits on one of the Council’s complaints and notifications committees.

Ellen’s work experience has been at senior management level including corporate governance across sustainability areas in corporate and consulting roles in the private sector.  She also has a background in Local and State Government agencies, non-government organisations and scientific research. She is a skilled negotiator and has excellent communication skills from extensive consulting and committee experience with a variety of stakeholders and interest groups, often with disparate and competing objectives.

Ellen has extensive experience with working with participatory decision-making committees, including natural resources and planning committee processes, state-wide advisory committees, river and catchment management committees. She has also worked with Boards and Committees in public, private and not-for-profit sectors. As a Director and Chair of a not-for-profit organisation that operates a retail outlet and conducts sustainability education, Ellen has experience in establishing and monitoring governance procedures and financial overview.

As a community member of Council, Ellen is cognisant of representing the community interests. In particular, community consumer rights in terms of the level of care they receive and she has a commitment to ensure that the highest standards of professionalism and ethics are upheld by the physiotherapy practitioners.

Physiotherapy Council of NSW posed the following questions to:  Ellen

Can you tell us a bit about your day job?

I work remotely for a local government organisation in the far north west of NSW, working with several local councils to help them build capacity within their organisations and to help councils reduce their energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to achieve their part in the NSW state Net Zero targets.

I am also a member of the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Council which provides policy advice to the Parks and Wildlife Service in relation to the management of Tasmania’s parks, reserves and the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

What is it about your day job that you love the most?

Influencing people and organisations to make better choices about how we can all live sustainably is an innate driver for me. I am annoyingly passionate about the environment and sustainability - which means my friends are always asking for sustainability tips and I am involved in a lot of pro bono and advocacy work on sustainability and climate change.

I find that people are more receptive to behavioural change if they understand the implications of their actions on the environment and that you can show them tangible and practical options for making changes. The thing I love the most about this work is when people brag back to me about what they are now doing to reduce energy, waste or greenhouse gas emissions in their workplaces and home lives.

I also have a strong interest in ethics and governance in the workplace which fits neatly into the work of the Physiotherapy Council.

What have been the strongest influences in your career?

As a scientist I rely on data to help formulate ideas and create evidenced-based solutions to problems. One of the most valuable lessons I learned as a post-graduate marine science student was to keep perspective of what you can “see” in these results. A very wise professor at university counselled me on the importance of critically interpreting information and that perhaps my research experiments were not a failure. In fact, re-interpreting these “no results” as negative results opened up a range of questions for identifying what was really happening.

This taught me a valuable lesson in perspective and highlighted the need to reframe situations to look at and understand issues from different points of view, training and experience – this was truly an excellent life lesson.

What attracted you to working in the regulatory area?

I am an analytical and strategic thinker – the challenge of regulation is to ensure it works as an effective measure to uphold the law and the Code of Conduct for practitioners in how they undertake their work and interact with their patients.

My background has been environmental regulation and compliance, which led me into corporate governance which is how I ended up with Council as a community member.

I am interested in ethics and integrity and how it can be applied across any profession or workplace and how it influences people’s behaviour in a range of settings, including physiotherapy practice.

What preconceived ideas did you have about Council before you joined, versus what you know now?

I did not have any preconceived ideas about the Council, I have some experience with certification of environmental practitioners and assessing competency and suitability for their certification.  I believe that provided a good grounding, especially around ethical behaviour and the requirements for practitioners to exhibit a high standard of professional behaviour and meet the requirements of the Code of Conduct.

As a non-physiotherapist, I was not aware of the specifics of the role of Council, but of course had a basic understanding that there was a system in place for the protection of the health and safety of the public, as well as process for making and dealing with health care complaints in general.

You have a heavy load between your day job & Council responsibilities How do you remain resilient?

When I started with the Council I was working part-time and doing pro bono work with a Not-for-Profit organisation, so it was an easy introduction to the workload. Now that I am working full-time again (plus these other gigs), it just means I have to “amp” up my organisational skills and be strict about allocating time for each of my jobs. I have always been someone who has several “things” on the go at any one time, so allocating time around my usual employment commitments is key to staying on top of the responsibility for ensuring I am adequately and appropriately prepared for Council meetings and hearings.

I thrive on intellectual challenges, solving problems and observing how the human aspect interacts with those elements. We encounter all these things in the work of the Council – the harsh reality of misbehaviour or poor choices by practitioners and patients alike and we also see the caring and professional aspects of the majority of the profession who exhibit high levels of ethics and integrity.

I work remotely from home, so I have an easy option for short breaks to tend to my garden to refresh my enthusiasm and refocus my energy.