Bridget Kool

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.

After 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.

“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.

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 processes were in place when they went home, and visit the parents whose children had died.”

Bridget subsequently became national coordinator for EMST (Early Management of Severe Trauma), organising the training courses for doctors learning to manage major trauma.

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.

A SIGNIFICANT CAREER SHIFT

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 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.”

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.

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.

“When you’ve had a relatively privileged upbringing, you have a responsibility to use that for the betterment of others. I’ve tried to do that – give back and do some good.”

THE TRUE MEANING OF SERVICE

When it comes to embodying the essence of ‘Ut Serviamus’, Bridget is an example to us all. Among her many service roles, she recently stepped down as Chair of the Safekids NZ Advisory Board and was formerly on the executive of the Australasian Injury Prevention Network. For more than a decade, she was an invited member of the Statistics New Zealand Working Group for Serious Injury Information.

And it’s not just in a professional capacity that Bridget gives of her time and experience. At various points, she’s served on the Diocesan Old Girls’ League, the Heritage Foundation, and the School Board. She considers service a responsibility.

“When you’ve had a relatively privileged upbringing, you have a responsibility to use that for the betterment of others. I’ve tried to do that – give back and do some good.”

FONDLY RECALLING DIO DAYS

All three of Bridget’s daughters went to Dio from Form 1 (Year 7). Bridget attended with her two sisters. Her mother – Faye Cashmore (Macnicol), a past OGL president – and aunty, plus a number of cousins are also Dio alumnae. There’s something special about Dio, she says, particularly its strong sense of community and its values-driven approach.

“I often think about Dio and the role the School and many of its teachers played in my life. Meg Bayley was so amazing. She fostered in me a love of biology. She also showed me what good teaching looks like and how important relational teaching is. That’s been a really positive influence on me from Dio.”

And as for those two friends who got Bridget into nursing, she says they still meet regularly for breakfast.

Professor Bridget Kool