5 April 2023
Six years ago Dr Eugenia Romboli, along with her partner and three children, said goodbye to everyone and everything they knew in Spain to emigrate to New Zealand for a role as a Senior Medical Specialist at Harbour Hospice. Here’s why and how she found the transition.
Eugenia, what did your life look like before you came to New Zealand?
In Spain I had been working for seven years in a similar role to the one I took up at Harbour Hospice in a big hospital in Catalonia, Barcelona. We loved Barcelona. We still do, it’s our place. But it was becoming too stressful, too crowded. And my job had been stressful. As a doctor you do as much as you can to make a patient’s end-of-life experience nice. But your workload is big, and you feel like you’re on roller skates skating up and down the halls.
How did the decision to move to New Zealand come to be? It was a family decision. My partner and I wanted to find a quieter, less crowded place. We had heard lots of good things about New Zealand from a friend who had grown up in Timaru. So we had this nice view of New Zealand as smaller with lots of nature, which is important to us. My partner had also visited New Zealand and fallen in love with the suburb of Devonport.
So, you started looking for a job in New Zealand?
Yes, I started looking on the website ANZSPM (Australia New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine) and saw a role for Harbour Hospice. As soon as my partner saw that Harbour Hospice was close to Devonport that was it for him. He said ‘yes, we are living there’. Luckily, I got the job!
How was the move?
Everything happened within a couple of months of being offered the job. To be eligible to work in New Zealand I had to pass an IELTS English language exam and when you’re a doctor you must pass with the highest score. I had to sit the exam three times before I got a high enough score. We also had to organise visas. Once we arrived in Auckland, New Zealand we moved into a home in Devonport that Harbour Hospice had rented for us for four weeks. Then we found our own rental, in Devonport of course! In terms of getting set up, the hospice shops (which sell second-hand goods to raise funds for Hospice) were great. We bought a lot of furniture from them in our early days here.
What were the biggest adjustments you had to make in your role?
For the first two years I went home from work every day exhausted because it took such a lot out of me speaking English all day! And it took me a little while to adjust to the communication style used by staff, it is less direct than what I had been used to. But the team here is very supportive and after a year I was promoted to the position of Medical Team Leader.
And what about outside of work?
In Spain I ate my lunch every day at 2pm and dinner was at 10pm and the kids would go to bed at 10.30-11pm. In New Zealand the day starts so much earlier and it is frowned upon if you’re out with your children after 8pm. This has taken me a while to get used to.
What do you love about working at Harbour Hospice?
I have more time to spend with each patient and we take a multi-disciplinary team approach which helps us to always go back to what we’re doing and what our role is for the patient.
Everybody at Harbour Hospice is passionate about their work. Many of the non-clinical team members have been touched personally by hospice and in the clinical team we have a nice mix of experience. We enjoy a lot of engagement with the community, with a lot of volunteers who help to spread understanding about end-of-life care and what we do.
There are lots of paid education and professional development opportunities, as well as paid clinical supervision. And I have a better balance between work and family now. In Spain you can only have the option of working part-time when you have kids under eight, and this is quite difficult to organise. My position at Harbour Hospice is full-time but there is the possibility to work part-time, and I’m only on call every few weeks.
What do you love about living in New Zealand?
We love the slower, more relaxed pace of life and that we are surrounded by nature, it is within the city and we can go for walks along the beach and in the bush.
We love the Māori culture and the way in which we have been welcomed and educated in Māori culture by the friends we have made. In many ways it’s similar to our own culture with big families and big gatherings. And there’s more:
- We feel safe here
- Bare feet are openly accepted everywhere
- Multi-cultural cuisine
- Cheapest sushi on earth, cooked by Japanese
- The use of the word ‘awesome’ every three words!
- Watching the America’s cup from Mt Victoria (a hill in Devonport)
- Watching the Women’s Rugby World Cup final at Mt Eden park and crying with the performance of their haka
- My daughter performing a haka at school, it gave me goose bumps
Do you ever get back to Barcelona?
Yes, we try to go every year to see friends and family. We also go every year to Argentina, which is where I’m originally from, and England, where my partner is from.
