Peter Boyles - A/Director, Office of the Secretary

In this episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall from Culture & Wellbeing, gets to know Peter Boyles, the Acting Director of the Office of the Secretary. 

During our conversation, Peter speaks about how he came to pursue a career in pharmacy and the path he took to become Chief Pharmacist. 

Peter reflects on the challenging experience he had returning to Tasmania when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and on the work he was proud to be part of during this period. 

Peter speaks about embracing the opportunities that have come his way. He speak about always saying yes to new challenges and how this led him into stints as Acting Chief Executive of Public Health Services, Acting Chief Risk Officer, and ultimately to his current position as the Acting Director of the Office of the Secretary. 

He also talks about how we each develop skills we may not realise we have, and how these skills can be transferrable across many different domains. 

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall: Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the palawa people. I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. 

My name is Dorian Broomhall, and I'm the Manager of Culture & Wellbeing here at the Department of Health in lutruwita, Tasmania.

For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Peter Boyles, the current Acting Director of the Office of the Secretary. 

In our wide-ranging conversation, Peter reflects on the challenging period when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, describing his experience of getting him and his family back to Tasmania on some of the last flights out of France. 

Peter shares that after navigating the challenges of the pandemic, he returned to his role as Chief Pharmacist. This transition marked a significant shift, not just for him, but for everyone who had been working tirelessly throughout the crisis. 

Throughout his career, Peter embraced various opportunities that came his way, always saying yes to new challenges. This led him from his role as Chief Pharmacist to a brief stint as Acting Chief Executive of the Public Health Services, then across to the Acting Chief Risk Officer role, and ultimately to his current position as the Acting Director of the Office of the Secretary. 

 I start every conversation with the same question, so let's get into it.

What did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Peter Boyles:                     An Australian cricketer.

Dorian Broomhall:           Just a small thing.

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah. My early childhood was just hitting balls, kicking balls, throwing balls. If I wasn't in the water, I was chasing some sort of ball around.

Dorian Broomhall:           Where were you in the world at this particular point in time?

Peter Boyles:                     I've spent most of my life in Hobart, except for some small periods of time interstate and overseas.

Dorian Broomhall:           When you went through school here in Hobart, here in Tassie, when did you make a decision about what it's that you wanted to do professionally?

Peter Boyles:                     I haven't.

Dorian Broomhall:           Good, that's the best answer I've had yet. Then, if we look backwards, which is sometimes easier than forwards, what did you think that you'd have a go at first?

Peter Boyles:                     Both my parents were high school science teachers, so I reckon I probably gravitated to that early on. 

I wouldn't say I was a hugely focused student. I always thought I'd go to university, but I didn't particularly think too much about what I might do when I got there, I thought it'd be something science-based.

Then, we had to make applications for courses, so I filled something out. Then, I got invited into the pharmacy school and I thought, "Okay, have a crack at that."

Dorian Broomhall:           That's a reasonably humble way to become a pharmacist, really.

Peter Boyles:                     I think it's probably consistent with that, not really having a great grand plan. I reflect actually, in thinking about today, I've had many mentors in my career, but I remember a distinct conversation where I was having lunch with two of them at the same time. 

One of them said to me, "Pete, when you're thinking about your career and what you want to do work-wise, you've got to plan what you're doing now, how that's going to lead to the next step. You're always looking at the horizon about where you want to be and how you're going to get there."

The very next contribution was from another mentor who said, "No, you don't." I've just said, "Yes." That's been my approach the whole time, and I must say I've gone with the second piece of advice mainly, is without too much strategy just said, "Yes."

Dorian Broomhall:           I can relate to that one, perhaps more so as well than the other first piece of advice. Often that's easiest way to go, though it requires a willingness, right? It requires a willingness to give something a go. 

Even to go, "I'm interested enough in science. I've got an offer to do pharmacy. All right, I'm going to have a go." You don't strike me as someone who has a go and half arses it.

Peter Boyles:                     No. Yeah. I quite like being out of my comfort zone and trying new things, and that exciting phase where you're trying to get a grapple on what this new job is and this new challenge is.

I wouldn't say I enjoy the self-doubt, but moving through that really, almost chaos early phase in a difficult new job, and then reflecting on what you've learned, is I think something that I've got a lot of joy out of it.

                                                This year particularly, having done a couple of new jobs with next to no background, has been heaps of fun actually.

Dorian Broomhall:           When you graduated then as a pharmacist, what pharmacy work did you do?

Peter Boyles:                     Pharmacy has a pre-registration year after you've graduated from university, so it's a supervised year of practice, and I was very lucky, with a few friends from Hobart, to get a position at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. 

I had a fantastic year over there, and really consolidated my learning from uni. I suspect it helped me recognise what my own strengths and weaknesses were in the workplace and as a person, I suspect.

The first time I'd lived away from home. Yeah, the first time I'd really felt like maybe I was at least pretending to be an adult.

Dorian Broomhall:           A year in Melbourne, did you come back to Tassie after that year?

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah, I did. I came back and rolled straight into an Honours year at the Pharmacy School. Which again, wasn't ever on my radar, but I can't even remember how it happened, I think the head of school reached out to me and said, "There might be an opportunity for me there to do some research."

That was a pretty challenging year, I don't think I'm a researcher naturally. I had a bit of a crack at academia and decided that probably wasn't for me.

It was again, really a challenging year, I learned a lot, learned a lot about how to overcome any procrastination tendencies that I might've had. Because certainly when you're doing that sort of research, you really are left to your own devices, so if you haven't got that self-motivation and the ability to keep yourself on task, you can haemorrhage time pretty quickly.

Dorian Broomhall:           Especially when you've got such long periods between deadlines. There's not that manufactured pressure of, I need to get this done by X.

Peter Boyles:                     That's right. Yeah, they're big ticket items, gateways through the year. You need to be disciplined to make sure that you're giving yourself shorter-term goals that you can tick off on, to make sure you're making progress on the big ticket items.

Dorian Broomhall:           That's a really profound learning, I think.

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah, and I think actually, probably the more your career progresses and certainly the more senior people get in any roles, if that's where they're going, the more they have to be self-directed in what they're focusing on. 

I mean, I think every role still has the emails ping in or the phone calls made that you have to respond to, but certainly more senior roles in health, and I'm sure this is across any workplace, is as you pivot to more strategic roles, then you need to stop and work out what's important.

Whereas, earlier in your career it's much more of a transactional thing. There's a task, a discrete task, you do that. You might have 50 discrete tasks that you have to do, but they're coming in very obviously and with strong frameworks around how and what you might do.

It also allows you, I think, early in your career, to clock in and clock out, rather than take work home with you. It's more of a challenge this year, or it's certainly been more of a challenge for me as I've got older.

Dorian Broomhall:           After your little toe dip into academia then, I'll ask it straight out, when did you join the Tasmanian Health Service or whatever it might've been called at that particular time?

Peter Boyles:                     After I finished my Honours year, I went and visited a friend of mine who was living in New York at the time, and I spent three months in the US.

I think you might have been alluding to it, but one of my great passions in life has been a sport called real tennis, and my friend Jed, was working as a professional in a real tennis club in New York.

I couch surfed through his place and some other people's places along the eastern seaboard, basically in New York for three months.

Then I came back, did a few months locuming in pharmacies, including a weird stint in Port Macquarie. Then a job came up with the Department, and the work site for the job was 34 Davey Street, which got my attention, because the real tennis club in Hobart's at 45 Davey Street.

 I thought, "Oh, this might be a good opportunity to be able to play tennis before or after work or even sneak a lunchtime hit in."

I think also, the fact that it was a regulatory job, I think possibly subconsciously appealed to me as well.

Dorian Broomhall:           What is it about the regulatory environment that draws you?

Peter Boyles:                     I think it's the systems approach and the macro stuff that you can deal with in that space, rather than the micro. 

I think I've always been interested in society and our challenges and the like. I think there's huge value in providing direct services to people, including health services, but I think I've always been more reflecting on how can we do things better, and what are the society level levers that we can pull to improve whatever issue we're talking about? In this case, healthcare, so in my case, that's medicines and poisons regulation.

Dorian Broomhall:           You've absolutely carved out a career as a healthcare professional. Have you coupled that specialist with that more broad, general systems thinking?

Peter Boyles:                     With the specialising from a healthcare perspective, being a pharmacist and the training that I had to go through and the knowledge I had to learn, meant that, and I'm a strong advocate for pharmacists having very, very good health system knowledge, and that's really the bit that has been most useful to me, particularly as I've moved more and more into regulation. 

It's less around the moment to moment drug knowledge, outside of some specific high risk drugs that I'd probably claim to know a fair bit about, but not as a generalist anymore. 

My throwaway line is, "I'm not a real pharmacist anymore and I haven't been for a long time. I'm highly specialised in a particular area."

The health professional background gives you a whole lot of tools of the trade, that then you can apply into different areas. A friend of mine once gave me some advice, and this was around COVID time.

As we mature or continue through our work lives, we do, whether we know it or not, develop knowledge and skill sets. On occasion you might take the knowledge and skill in it, from a domain that you're really comfortable and confident in, and move it into a novel space that you don't know much about.

That's a good time to then step back and reflect on your knowledge and skills and the tools that you might have, and then apply them into this slightly foreign environment whilst you build up your domain knowledge.

 That's been something I've reflected on, particularly this year, in terms of trying new things and just trying to make sure that you go, "Yeah, you've got these baseline approaches to difficult problems.

You might not inherently understand the issues as well in your new environment, but you've still got the same techniques to problem solving and information gathering that are going to serve you well."

Dorian Broomhall:           Totally, and again, when you're just there doing it, you're not thinking about how you're doing it. 

Peter Boyles:                     No. 

Dorian Broomhall:           You actually have to really actively step out of it.

Peter Boyle:                       Muscle memory at that point, almost.

Dorian Broomhall:           Yeah, exactly right. You were working, I believe, as the Chief Pharmacist. You've achieved quite a lot to get to that position in Tasmania. Then COVID hit, and you were working as essentially a senior person within Public Health Services. 

Peter Boyles:                     I wasn't actually.

Dorian Broomhall:           Were you not?

Peter Boyles:                     No, I was trying to take a year off with my family, in the south of France.

Dorian Broomhall:           Had you left?

Peter Boyles:                     We were eight months into our 12 months overseas.

Dorian Broomhall:           Right, so you were actually away.

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah. 

Dorian Broomhall:           You got yourself back here though, clearly.

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:           Pretty quickly, I would suspect.

Peter Boyles:                     My wife and I have been following the news, and checking back into Australia almost on a daily, if not multiple times a day, around whether or not we needed to leave.

We finally made the decision, I think it was early March, because it was just before all the borders closed. We spoke to our travel agent, who said, "Well, if you're going to leave you need to leave in the next two days, because borders are closing and airports are closing."

We made the decision, "Okay, we're going to go," and we had a couple of days to get ready. The next morning our travel agent rang and said, "You need to be in the Bordeaux airport in two and a half hours, because there are airports closing and I'm going to struggle to get you home if you don't get out of the country soon, today."

We said, "But we're an hour and a half's drive from the airport and we haven't finished packing." She said, "Which bit don't you understand? I need you to get on this plane, otherwise I don't think I can get you home."

 We had flight cancellations, and we had to rebook and the like, and we eventually got back. My wife and I worked out, we probably didn't have any sleep for about two and a half days, just running on adrenaline, trying to book flights and those sorts of things.

When we landed, the head steward on our flight said, "This was the last international flight." We were on Qantas, and Qantas had grounded its fleet, so we really got in just at the last moment.

We managed to get to Hobart without having to quarantine. A matter of days later I think, people were having to quarantine for two weeks every time they entered a new state. 

I rang my boss the next morning, in part to say, "Hey, we're alive, we're back," because she'd been checking in, and she said, "Any chance she could come into work? There's a lot going on." This was in Public Health. 

We were pretty busy, and then we closed the hospital, I think the first day I started, which was I think a day and a half after we landed.

I had a computer dropped off at the bottom of the driveway, and went and collected that, and then worked out of the garage for a couple of weeks before we got out of quarantine and went to work into COVID and hospitals being closed.

Dorian Broomhall:           That's just such a wild trip, of going from the south of France to essentially three, four days later from thinking, "Oh yeah, we might leave soon."

Peter Boyles:                     We were on a big farm that had a pool on it, and I think it was 150 hectares. Essentially, France had been in lockdown, and I just went to the shops every week or so to get some more food and that was it. 

The weather was getting warm, and we thought we'd be able to ride it out, but then that all changed in a real hurry. A bit of a change from sitting by the pool three or four days earlier, to working in a pretty emerging COVID space.

Dorian Broomhall:           Most people never work in an emergency response like that. You dropped yourself into it or were dropped into it at pretty short notice then, especially after having what sounds like a lovely time for eight months. What did you draw on, leading a fair amount of work fairly quickly?

Peter Boyles:                     I think a high level of respect and trust for the people that I was working with in that space. I wouldn't say it was confidence, but just head down up, bum up,  trying to work through every unique issue as it came up.

A big challenge, being strategic in that space, because it was absolutely complex chaos, and that was the real challenge, because there were a lot of people that we were trying to support, who were really struggling with the chaotic nature of the response.

When I say chaotic, I don't mean that as a criticism of the people involved. It was the chaos that things were changing all the time. 

Trying to work out clinical protocols. By the time those sorts of things had been drafted, there'd been a new bit of information had come out from the Commonwealth, that meant that document was now obsolete before we'd even finished it.

Those sorts of things, and the daily news conferences, also meant things were changing in terms of what came out of those conferences, what were announced by the Premier for example. 

It meant that things that we might've been working on were changing pretty rapidly. Again, that's not a criticism, that's how fast it was moving when you've got a global pandemic.

Dorian Broomhall:           It's the perfect example really, of where we don't always pay attention to the environment that we're working in, because the environment is dictating all of that, and that's a real prime example of it. 

That the environment's constantly shifting and we need to shift with that and around that.

Peter Boyles:                     Everybody struggled, there was nobody that didn't have challenges in that environment, but certainly there were some very, very energetic and talented people who were struggling with the chaotic nature.

Mostly from an emotional perspective, not lacking in their ability to do the job. Just almost the daily grief of saying, "I've invested this time and effort into something and it's now, before I've even finished it, the rules have changed and we're off doing something else."

Dorian Broomhall:           Fast forward a little bit, we got through the pandemic, and thanks to people like yourself, we fared incredibly well in this state. What did you do then?

Peter Boyles:                     What did I do? I went back to my normal job as Chief Pharmacist.

Dorian Broomhall:           That would've felt very strange.

Peter Boyles:                     It was definitely a gear change. It did feel strange for a while, but I was going back to a team and a group of people that I had worked with for a long time and have a lot of affection for and a lot of respect for. 

In that sense it was a reassuring comfort, for want of a better phrase. I remember distinctly, in fact, I gave advice to others that had come out of, after me, a COVID experience, because I think I came back into the Department proper, mid to late 2021.

I actually warned a lot of people, to say, "You might find that you crash after you come back." I think it's the adrenaline, even though that sounds ridiculous, to have adrenaline for 12 months or months and weeks on end, but I think people did, and a lot of us actually struggled with the gear change of coming back to a normal job.

That's not to suggest those jobs don't have high workloads and high expectations and the like, but nothing compares to the intensity of working in a COVID space, I think.

It's almost like, you get stuck with this, almost guilt, that you might go and have a lunch break, or that you might go home at a reasonable hour, or that when you leave work, circling back to an earlier comment, you're not then spending your whole evening thinking about all the stuff that has been happening through the day, and did you miss anything or what's going to happen tomorrow?

It's almost like going back to that sense that work is a component of your life, not the dominant force. 

Part of the challenges behind that was, it's not grief, because a lot of us were like, "That was really hard and it's over, and that's not a bad thing." It is that sense of discomfort or disquiet about, "Something doesn't quite feel right."

Dorian Broomhall:           You've then continued to say yes to a few things, by the sounds of things, in the last 12 months or so. You're currently sitting in the role of the Director of the Office of the Secretary, and before that you stepped into the role of the Chief Risk Officer when it was vacated quite quickly, when Lisa Howes moved into a new position down at DPAC. 

Where were we at that time, for that opportunity to come up, for you to say, "Oh, yeah, I'll jump into that."

Peter Boyles:                     I think I'd actually just finished saying yes to helping George Clarke have a couple, two or three months off as the CE of Public Health Services. 

I'd done a stint in there, and I think I'd probably just gone back to Pharmaceutical Services briefly, and then I got a call from Dale, or a message from Dale saying that he wanted to have a chat with me.

That led to a few months in the Office of the Chief Risk Officer, which was great. Way out of my comfort zone, I learned a lot, met a lot of really lovely motivated people, learned a lot about areas of the Department that if I knew they existed, I really didn't know much about what they did or the value that they were providing. 

Not that I doubted that they would be, but it was lots of fun learning a whole lot of new things. I like this phrase, it felt like drinking from a fire hydrant.

Dorian Broomhall:           Yeah, I can imagine.

Peter Boyles:                     Seemingly, all day every day, people doing really important work, needing to brief you on that important work. Needing you to understand, contextualise it, and then be able to understand what they were doing, what they needed from you, in terms of how you could help them, and what might need to be passed on and up the chain, for example.

Trying to, I think, get across a whole lot of really new issues, in a domain you didn't really know or understand quickly. I was very conscious of not wanting to be a limiting step for people to get on with their work. 

A lot of that job is empowering people to get on and do some of the work they do, but in that empowering, you need to also have some solid understanding of what they're getting on and doing, and making sure that you're appropriately aware of it, and hopefully only rarely, providing some feedback around strategic direction.

I say rarely, in the sense of, there's a lot of good people in this Department, doing some really good stuff. They don't need me to come in and tell how to suck eggs.

Dorian Broomhall:           There are so many people doing so much great work all of the time, it's almost impossible to keep up with. 

That would've been interesting too, in a space where it's a new portfolio, it's a bunch of functions that have come together in a new way for the first time, and we're making sense of that as we go.

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah, so very new. Some brand new business units. The Office of the Chief Risk Officer had only recently been created, so one of the things that we started down the process of was, creating a sense of identity for OCRO, and a sense of team approach. 

I think all of the individual business units had already created that really well, but across the business units, so that they were a sense of, they were part of that portfolio. Yes, it was really, and still is, in a very foundational phase, I think.

Having been in environments where I was, well, COVID aside, I had spent most of my career in quite a mature space in terms of business unit development and the like, building on a lot of past work of people, as opposed to that sense of a greenfield site.

Dorian Broomhall:           Now, stepped into the Office of the Secretary. There's an enormous amount of stuff that needs to happen immediately in your portfolio now, right?

Peter Boyles:                     Yeah.

Dorian Broomhall:           How's that shift been?

Peter Boyles:                     It reminds me a bit of COVID. In the sense of, there's an immediacy required in what you're doing. You contrast that with people that are subject matter experts in their field. 

I think the Director in OTS has a lot more of a need to be able to get across new issues quickly, contextualise, understand and identify who your key stakeholders are that might need to be informed, how they need to be informed, what they need to be informed of. 

Again, just working out how you can support people to get on and do their job. Particularly the OTS role, it's also working out what's important and what's not, because there is more information coming in than you can process at a high level.

That has really made me reflect on how I'm identifying what's important and what's not. I don't have any great insight into that, other than you start to get a feel for it after a while.

Certainly early on, again, it felt like drinking from a fire hose, just issues all day every day. They're brand new to you as well, or if they're not brand new to you, certainly the context you're getting them in is new, to the context that you might've been exposed to them. 

You're getting into much more of a whole of government type of exposure to the issues, rather than your niche part.

Dorian Broomhall:           How have you found that has been, with this lens that you actually have as a healthcare specialist?

Peter Boyles:                     I think it's given me some comfort as a healthcare professional, that albeit it's a long time since I've been a real one, I still have that sense of base level understanding of what happens in healthcare, down to the mechanical level of nurses on wards, pharmacists floating around on wards, surgeons, OT's, etc.

The concept of a hospital and the concept of primary care, how tertiary services and primary care services interact with each other, the challenges in the interaction. 

My regulatory background also has meant I've had quite a lot of exposure to legal matters. It's also meant I've had a fair bit of time in parliament, for example, when we've been getting bills through, which has been quite useful, because the Director supports the Secretary a lot. 

This Secretary probably doesn't need too much support in those environments, but certainly I'm physically present in things like, this morning we were at the Commission of Inquiry Hearing or the Parliamentary Committee on the Commission of Inquiry implementation. We've been through budget estimates in my time, which was-

Dorian Broomhall:           About the second week you started or something was it?

Peter Boyles:                     Not quite, but certainly very early on, and we've got a few bills that will be going through parliament. Hopefully I won't need to present for them.

Dorian Broomhall:           That's a nice point though, of being able to link all of that in together, remembering that at the end of the day that there's a person that comes up to access our service, he's a member of our community, and that's what we're actually here for. It's quite a lot sometimes to package all of that into one though, isn't it?

Peter Boyles:                     Absolutely, and I think it's really useful to keep that in the back of your mind. We might not all be feeling that we're directly impacting on it, but we are all playing our role in ensuring that Tasmanians are getting a world-class health system, or have access to it. 

One of the things I reflect on, in the challenges of our health system and our service delivery, which are real, is that in Tasmania in 2024, if you need the Health Service, you've won the lottery of human history.

Could we be doing better, trying to do better? Absolutely. There's always going to be room for improvement, and there are real challenges in health service delivery globally at the moment. 

I think we, particularly as workers within our health system, should take pride in the fact that we are delivering a world-class system.

Dorian Broomhall:           It's very easy to forget that when we read the front page of the paper or whatever.

Peter Boyles:                     Absolutely, and I don't want that to be interpreted as that we don't have challenges.

Dorian Broomhall:           Absolutely.

Peter Boyles:                     They're serious challenges, we know that, but we can approach those serious challenges with dedication and energy, to improve them or address those challenges. We can do that whilst still reflecting on the world-class nature of Tasmania and Australia's healthcare system.

Dorian Broomhall:           No matter what challenges we solve, we'll come up with some more. Pete, thanks so much for the conversation. It's been great.

Peter Boyle:                       You're welcome.

Dorian Broomhall:           Thanks to Peter Boyle, the Acting Director of the Office of the Secretary, for taking time to speak with us, and to you for listening. 

I hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away and apply into your own life.