NEVER A DULL MOMENT Professor Bridget Kool (1977) has packed a great deal into her personal and professional life. Her recent appointment as Pro Vice-Chancellor Education at the University of Auckland is the latest accomplishment in a fulfilling career of nursing, teaching, research and leadership roles.
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fter hearing how much fun two of her best friends were having training as nurses, Bridget Kool decided to join them near the end of her 7th form year at Dio. In the days before nursing was a degree course, she trained on the job at Auckland Hospital and within six weeks was looking after patients.
processes were in place when they went home, and visit the parents whose children had died.”
“I loved every minute of my hospital training; it was everything I hoped it would be – the personal interactions and the relationships you established. It was stimulating and interesting, and really tapped into my love of sciences,” she says.
In a feat that can only be described as superhuman, she found time to raise four children, and gain a master’s degree in public health (her thesis focused on paediatric burn injuries), and a PhD that looked at the role of alcohol in falls in the home. When Bridget started her PhD, all four children were still at school – the youngest in Year 6. Her PhD was followed by postdoctorate study focusing on paediatric traumatic brain injury. Her research aims, she explains, were to prevent injuries by being the fence at the top of the cliff after years of being the ambulance at the bottom.
DEDICATED TO INJURY PREVENTION Over a nursing career that spanned 25 years, Bridget maintained her clinical nursing and held a number of leadership roles. Having always loved children, she moved from general to paediatric surgical nursing, and so began her interest in injury prevention. “Starship was being built at that time and they were setting up a paediatric trauma service with a holistic approach to managing kids with physical injuries,” she says. “I’d done around 12 years of nursing and was asked to take on the trauma coordinator role. It was very intensive, but I loved it. I’d visit the families and make sure all the rehab
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DIO TODAY
Bridget subsequently became national coordinator for EMST (Early Management of Severe Trauma), organising the training courses for doctors learning to manage major trauma.
Associate Dean (Academic) at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. At the end of 2021, she was made a professor, a process she describes as very rigorous. “I’ve had a less traditional trajectory than most professors. I came late to academia.” In her current role as Pro Vice-Chancellor Education, Bridget now has oversight of academic matters across the University’s academic programme’s eight faculties. The University is currently undertaking a significant curriculum transformation that will reshape the structure of its courses and how they are taught. “It’s really exciting, but it has been a huge amount of work,” acknowledges Bridget. “I do long hours, but my husband is incredibly supportive.”
A SIGNIFICANT CAREER SHIFT
Bridget’s Pro Vice-Chancellor role takes up four days of her week and the fifth day is allocated to research and supervision of postgraduate students – she’s currently working with four PhD candidates and one master’s student.
Her studies and research opened her up to the world of academia and Bridget went on to tutor and lecture at the University of Auckland. She’s also held a raft of leadership roles there. Among them as Academic Director for the School of Population Health (SOPH), and then as
In addition to being a former editor of the Australian New Zealand Journal for Public Health and an associate editor for Injury, Bridget has published more than 100 papers in top-ranking injuryrelated journals.
