Kaart Patnaikuni

Master of Health Management

Singaporean national Kaart Patnaikuni emigrated to Perth as an international student back in the year 2000, to undertake an undergraduate degree in pharmacy at Curtin University. Since then, she’s pursued a career in clinical pharmacy, rising in seniority until she found a skills gap hindering her advancement into senior pharmacy management. She’s just spent the last two years filling that gap by studying for her Master of Health Management degree with us.

“Since I completed my training, I’ve carved out a career working in pharmacies in private hospitals. Along the way, I’ve moved to Melbourne, and had a couple of kids who have kept me busy.

“Increasing family commitments saw me drop back to part-time work, and I largely work on weekends, when I have clinical responsibility as a team leader.

“But a couple of years ago I hit a natural inflection point. Like many people, my experiences during and after COVID-19 made me want to change things up, and my kids are getting more independent. I felt ready to take on more, but I soon realised my clinical pharmacy skills weren’t the skills I needed in order to do that.

“Undergraduate study gives you a grounding in subject matter, and teaches you how to think, but it doesn’t provide the managerial skills to be an effective leader.”

After exploring options around doing an MBA, Kaart found our Master of Health Management course, and elected to enrol in that.

“I’m really passionate about healthcare and the work I do. This was a great way to upskill within an area I care about.”

In 2022 she began her studies, enjoying the flexibility of the online learning and ability to study part-time while working and parenting.

The course curriculum covers a range of business and leadership skills required in health and healthcare: finance, research governance and ethics, health policy, health system design, quality and safety, implementation science, and clinical leadership and management, to name a few.

“It really has given me a more ‘systems’ mindset,” she says. “Health service departments tend to be quite siloed and telescopic, and I have much more appreciation now for how complex and interconnected health systems are.

“One of the great things about the course was the huge range of backgrounds my peers were drawn from across the health system. They came from paramedicine, medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, social work and more, it was a really rich and fascinating mix. It was great to share and work on common problems found across the health system, and take away new ideas that I can apply to pharmacy.

The case study component is a mandatory requirement of the degree. Like many students, Kaart chose a subject close to home, that she could draw practical lessons from.

“I chose to spend my case study year researching incident reporting in my local pharmacy context, where medication errors are identified and immediately entered into a reporting system. The theory is that everyone can understand how the error arose, and then identify and implement steps to prevent it from happening again. But like many processes, it’s a great theory, but we don’t always see the improvements in patient safety we’d like to see generated.

“The last year of my degree was spent interviewing a range of people at my workplace, and analysing what they said, to find insights into how we can improve translation of these reports into action. It was great to learn the ropes of research in such a supported way, and to conduct a project that has immediate real-world applications for me and my workplace.

“Now that I’m finishing, I look forward to using my improved skills from the course towards uplifting patient safety outcomes, and driving efficiency through digitisation of health data and processes.”

Find out more about our Master of Health Management.