Professor Chris Baggoley AO DUniv
BMBS ’80, BSocAdmin ’84, DUniversity ’12
By Kate Holland
Professor Baggoley AO was one of Australia’s most distinguished and respected medical leaders, but his journey to the top was not a straightforward one. In fact, his career didn’t even start in medicine.
Professor Baggoley grew up in Melbourne, Victoria, as the youngest son of hard-working parents who had no qualifications beyond high school. His father was a textile import agent and his mother was a homemaker who he says carried out her role remarkably given her right arm was completely paralysed by polio, which she contracted while pregnant with him. Despite this challenge and all that entailed, they gave him a good education and encouraged him to pursue his interests.
Unsure what he wanted to do at university, Professor Baggoley enrolled in a veterinary science degree at Melbourne University, which he graduated with first class honours. He says he enjoyed working with animals, but also felt a curiosity about human health and disease. “I decided when I was doing my veterinary science course that I would gain more personal satisfaction, and do more for society, if I pursued a career in medicine. That really was a rather pompous overreach on my part, but I haven’t ever regretted my career change.”
Professor Baggoley moved over to Adelaide in 1974 to join the inaugural intake of medical students at Flinders University. He worked as a vet while studying, graduated in 1980 and started his internship at Flinders Medical Centre.
“I am most grateful for the opportunity that was afforded to me by Flinders – to be able to come from Melbourne and embark on a second degree at a time when those sorts of opportunities were very limited. Without it, my life would have been totally different. Because of my entry into the Flinders Medical School,
and the energetic and innovative teaching faculty there, I have had such a rich, satisfying, privileged and rewarding experience.” In addition to medicine, Professor Baggoley completed a degree in social administration at Flinders University in 1983, which gave him a broader perspective on the social and economic factors affecting health and healthcare.
Forging a Professional Path
Although he started out in his postgraduate years as a physician trainee, Professor Baggoley says he much preferred the pace and practice of clinical care in the emergency department (ED).
He put it down to a short attention span. “The requirement to help multiple patients, rapidly and effectively, suited my temperament,” he says.
Short attention aside, he was good at it and went on to specialise in emergency medicine, gaining a fellowship (FACEM) in 1986. He rose through the ranks of emergency medicine, becoming the Director of Emergency Medicine at Flinders Medical Centre, Ashford Private Community Hospital and Royal Adelaide Hospital.
It was working in these environments and increasingly overcrowded EDs that caused him to reflect on the circumstances where a health system could allow such overloading to occur. He also stepped into the fields of medical administration and health policy, becoming Executive Director of Medical Services at the Adelaide Community Healthcare Alliance from 2000 to 2003.
Roles as Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for South Australia and Australia followed, with a periodas Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare in between. The title of CMO comes with a variety of tasks, including public health, and Professor Baggoley contended with many infectious disease outbreaks in South Australia and across the world.
He became involved with the World Health Organization (WHO) and took part in the annual World Health Assembly on six occasions. He was asked to Chair the WHO Emergency Committee on MERS (the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), was a member of the WHO Ebola Emergency Committee and contributed to the international response to Zika in his role as CMO for Australia.
Despite all this experience, he says he feels very lucky to have been Australia’s CMO after the H1N1 influenza pandemic and before COVID. “Either of those, especially COVID as it has lasted so long, would have been extraordinarily demanding.
My regard for Jim Bishop, who preceded me, and for Brendan Murphy who led Australia during the early phase of COVID with such authority, expertise and resolve is very, very high.”
Professor Baggoley retired from his role as Australia’s CMO in 2016 but didn’t stop contributing to the health sector. He held a variety of roles, such as Executive Director of Medical Services for the Southern Adelaide Local Health Network, and positions on numerous boards. Professor Baggoley resigned from his most recent job as Chief Medical Advisor at Calvary Care in 2019 while he was being treated for pancreatic cancer.
However, not even a cancer diagnosis, for which he had major surgery and six months of chemotherapy, could stop Professor Baggoley in his tracks.
He was appointed to the Board of the Little Company of Mary Health Care (Calvary) where he was made Chair of the Clinical Governance Committee. Determined to make a difference, he accepted an invitation to become a director, then later Deputy Chair, of the Board of Pankind, the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Foundation. He is now a Director of the FCD (Flinders and Charles Darwin) Health Board and Member of WHO’s Independent Oversight and Advisory Committee (IOAC) – Emergency Programmes.
Gratitude and Gravitas
Professor Baggoley says he has been privileged to undertake such a variety of roles, and each seemed to be right for the time in his career. He concurs that the essential art of communication he learnt studying medicine stood him in good stead for them\all. “The ability to communicate in a way that a patient and their family or carers could understand was essential.”
Looking back, he says he particularly enjoyed working in leadership
roles but will never take for granted the privilege of providing direct clinical care, especially to those in urgent need for assistance.
“Having a person put their trust in me and whatever skill I could bring to them was a very solemn interaction.”
As well as holding various prestigious positions, Professor Baggoley has received numerous awards and honours, including Flinders University honouring him with the University’s highest alumni award, a Convocation Medal in 1999, followed by an Honorary Doctor of the University in 2012. Professor Baggoley was also made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2013 and elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences in 2015 – and the extensive list goes on.
While he says he was inspired and supported by many people throughout his career, he credits Professor Garry Phillips, a former Director of the Flinders Medical Centre Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Units, as well as Director of the Emergency Department and the President of The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA), as the person who took a particularly keen interest in his career and his family. They remained good friends until his death in 2016.
He says he will be forever grateful to Flinders for giving him the chance to study medicine. Were he to meet his younger self, he would implore him to “be very grateful for the blessings that will come in your life because there will be many”.
Having just become one of the 10% who survive pancreatic cancer at the five-year mark, Professor Baggoley is not tempting fate by making long-term plans. He loves to walk daily with friends, follow the Sydney Swans and add to his 1,600 strong Phantom comic book collection.
His aim is to continue doing what he can, for as long as he can, and enjoy each and every day along the way.