11 August 2022
Harbour Hospice Chief Executive Jan Nichols celebrates 10 years at the helm this year. Here, we look back over her career and learn why delivering end-of-life care to the community sits so close to Jan’s heart.
The beauty of life is that it’s not completely mapped out. We sometimes take unexpected turns that lead us down paths we might not otherwise have travelled.
In the case of Harbour Hospice Chief Executive Jan Nichols, she began her career as a nurse because she wanted to work with people and travel. And that’s what her work gave her, taking her to some incredible parts of the world.
But when she was in her 30s and raising her family back in New Zealand she experienced the devastating loss of a young cancer patient that changed the course of her nursing career forever.
This beautiful teenage girl was not the first terminally ill young person Jan had nursed, but her death had a profound effect on her.
“As a mother of young children, I found it very hard to comprehend how you could deal with the loss of a child. But my sadness was outweighed by the way that this family dug deep, stayed with their daughter in the hospital oncology ward and lovingly cared for her until the very end of her life. I realised that people have incredible resilience and that what they need from us most of all is our skills and compassionate support so they can complete this difficult but life-changing work,” Jan says.
A new direction
So, Jan applied for (and secured) a job she might never have otherwise considered - as a Nurse Manager for a hospice – St Joseph's Hospice, now known as Mercy Hospice.
Through that process of applying for the role she realised that the values of hospice truly resonated with her. “The hospice philosophy is, ‘You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.’
“Until that point, a lot of my career had been focused on cure. But the biggest challenge was always when we were unable to cure people. And that’s what now interested me - being with people when treatment wasn't successful and supporting them and their family, mind, body and spirit,” she says.
Leading the charge
Palliative care was only a very small part of New Zealand’s healthcare offering at the time, and with little training available Jan traveled to the UK to gain the knowledge she craved – returning on a mission to educate more health professionals and increase access to the hospice service.
Beginning with Mercy, Jan and her peers quickly developed a community team, fundraising team, volunteer team, administration team, medical team and family support team. “We started a lot of services from the very ground up,” she says.
The hospice facility itself was relocated from Epsom to a purpose-fitted building at College Hill in Ponsonby – a stunning, park-like location in the centre of Auckland. And just six years after starting at Mercy, Jan took over as Chief Executive.
Along the way Jan actively fundraised for Mercy. She and a team of likeminded colleagues completed the New York marathon, raising $60,000 for the organisation. Jan crossed that finish line just a year after taking up running – “one of my greatest achievements”, she says with a smile.
And she completed a Master of Public Health with first class honours and co-established and lectured at the University of Auckland’s palliative care postgraduate programme. She helped develop two national healthcare strategies for the Ministry of Health – its Palliative Care Strategy and the Cancer Control Strategy and Action Plan.
It was a time of enormous change for palliative care in New Zealand. Jan reflects, “It was exciting to experience the growth in awareness of hospice during those years and the expansion of what it has to offer. I was delighted to see Palliative Medicine recognised as a specialty and to witness the growth in interest and skills of health professionals in many parts of the health service.”
Coming into Harbour
By 2012 Jan was itching for a new challenge again. The Chief Executive role came up at the-then North Shore Hospice and Jan applied for, and secured, that position.
Ten years on, Jan is renowned at Harbour Hospice for her hands-on approach. She has handwritten personal messages to each of her 230 staff members at Christmas and run several half marathons to fundraise for the charity.
In 2021 she won the Westfield Local Heroes award and her humble response was, “It’s a wonderful reflection of the service that hospice offers.”
Under Jan’s leadership Harbour Hospice has undergone several major changes. In 2018, North Shore Hospice was merged with local hospices on the Hibiscus Coast and in Warkworth/Wellsford, to become one entity. By combining the three areas the service was better able to meet the needs of those communities.
Then in March 2021 work began on the redevelopment of its North Shore site. The facility, along with the six-year-old Tui House at Warkworth, and a recently refurbished Hibiscus House at Red Beach, will help future-proof Harbour Hospice for the growing and ageing population it serves.
New strategies and programmes have been introduced to develop and support staff as well as the family caregivers, health professionals they support outside the organisation.
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is the people, it is the people, it is the people
Jan is deeply proud of the Harbour Hospice whānau.
“Everyone involved has a passion for hospice and for the people we care for. Whether you're a volunteer selling a piece of clothing in one of our 17 shops or one of our clinical team delivering frontline services, we're all there with the same goal in mind- to deliver a really high standard of care.
“I feel really proud of our community engagement, too,” she says. “The fact that we have more than 1200 volunteers who freely give us their time. Each one of our sites was started by its community, and that makes us unique.”
Those that don’t know better might think that hospice is a depressing place to work, but Jan says that belief couldn’t be further from the truth.
“I think you need to go back to the philosophy of hospice, which is to help people live well in the time they have remaining. Hopefully , we get to spend time with patients over a reasonable period of time, and if you love people it's just amazing that they share these experiences, their family, their culture with you. You learn so much and it enriches you - as a human being, as a parent, as a member of society.”
