When Joy Arnot started her career in nursing in 1964, university degrees for the profession didn’t even exist – so she hit the ground running.
“In those days you received a certificate, so I qualified with honours at The Alfred and then went on to do a certificate in Midwifery at The Royal Women’s Hospital,” she says.
Nonetheless, the learning didn’t stop there for Joy, who went on to work in midwifery, children and general nursing, geriatric nursing, complete another certificate in rehabilitation and gerontology nursing, before running a Community Rehabilitation Centre in Bairnsdale for nearly nine years.
“I finally came to Dandenong Hospital in November of 1988, and I remember it vividly because it was still just Dandenong and District Hospital and there was no such thing as Monash Health yet,” Joy says.
She was responsible for running the Community Rehabilitation Centre on site, which was unusual at the time to see attached to a hospital itself and not a subacute centre.
“We would have clients who stayed all day, and we gave them meals. The centre ran a small commuter bus that used to go and pick people up and bring them into the centre,” Joy says.
Joy Arnot has had the pleasure of working across many different areas of the organisation for the last 35 years.
While Joy has worked as a Team Leader and Case Manager in the Home-Based Community Rehabilitation Team at Cranbourne since 2004, she has been instrumental in shaping the health service in many ways over the last 35 years.
Joy helped work on the design for the Community Rehabilitation Gym and Therapy space inside the Cranbourne Integrated Care Centre before it was built and set up the first Cardiac Rehabilitation Program out of a Community Rehabilitation Centre in the country.
Joy also set up a Home and Community Care team to work alongside the Community Rehabilitation team, acquiring funding for nursing, physiotherapy, podiatry, speech pathology and occupational therapy. She was also key in setting up our HMS system to record and report accurate clinical data, which we still use to this day.
It’s always been important to Joy Arnot to have elements of patient interaction in all of her roles.
“I haven’t needed to go elsewhere as I’ve experienced so many changes in my whole career at both Dandenong Hospital and then Monash Health,” she says.
“I feel I had the ability to keep adapting to the changes, and to bring my team with me, so I have a really positive outlook on life and I see every challenge as an opportunity to be better.”
As well as a never-ending variety of opportunities, Joy says she’s found Monash Health a great place to work for the last 35 years for a multitude of reasons.
“I love the diversity of clients that come to Monash Health, and I loved the Dandenong area because we had lots of people from different cultures and I’m eternally grateful I’ve been able to work with such a great diverse group of people,” she says.
“I’ve been able to work in acute, subacute and community and I really liked how Monash Health didn’t just concentrate on the hospitals when it started up, but really had a community and mental health outlook as well which is how I ended up here in the first place!”.
In her current role, Joy is able to manage a team that brings excellent care right to people’s doorsteps.
However, Joy’s time at Monash Health is set to come to an end, and she will be retiring in June for a well-deserved break.
“When I gave my team the date I was retiring they did not want to believe that this was final, I told them I’ve got to hand the baton on to you and you’ve got to embrace it and run with it,” she says.
“I will miss meeting and listening to the clients we have, sharing a small part of their journey, and working with them to help them achieve what they want to achieve.”
For existing and future Monash Health employees, Joy had one piece of advice.
“Embrace everything that Monash Health offers because there are so many opportunities to grow your career through experience and education, whether you choose to stay in the acute, subacute or community areas of the organisation.”