78 | Dr. Ashley Bloomfield on leadership in a pandemic & the Director General

Doctor NOS

Dr. Ashley Bloomfield is a public health physician and leader, having been the chief advisor of public health in Ministry of Health New Zealand, before moving to become the Director of Services of Population Health across the Wellington District Health Boards, then Chief Executive at Hutt Valley DHB. He is best known as our immediate former Director-General of Health, famed for his COVID response and compassion in his communication.
In this episode, we discuss his journey into public health and the various leadership roles he has held before his position as Director General. We discuss his gap year, his time locuming in the UK, before finally returning to NZ for training. He unpacks his lessons leading before and during the pandemic, challenges of being Director General, and what work-life balance and resilience means to him.

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Audio credit:
Bliss by Luke Bergs https://soundcloud.com/bergscloud
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/33DJFs9
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/e9aXhBQDT9Y

Chapter

1. Ashley Bloomfield (00:00:00)

2. Finding medicine (00:01:21)

3. Taking a gap year and finding public health (00:03:20)

4. Timing policy changes (00:13:51)

5. Leadership/clinical governance experience (00:18:08)

6. The job of a chief executive (00:22:59)

7. Changing workforce cultures and setting a standard (00:26:30)

8. Experience as DG (00:32:43)

9. Testing our resilience (00:38:40)

10. Work-life balance (00:42:33)

11. What's next? (00:46:07)