‘Once a nurse, always a nurse’ is the attitude that Labor’s Ged Kearney is bringing to her role as Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care.

This week, Ms Kearney joined The Tea Room to chat nursing, aged care, worker advocacy and refugee healthcare.

The area that she’s most keen to sink her teeth into, though, is how healthcare is delivered differently between the sexes – the effects of which, Ms Kearney says, are “write large before our very noses”.

“Starting at the top, [I am] getting everybody that I know who cares about this – and there's a lot of people out there that do care about this – to sit around a table and design perhaps an inquiry or a deep dive into [women’s health outcomes],” she says.

Before entering politics in 2018, Ms Kearney worked as a nurse on a gastrointestinal ward and was federal secretary of the Australian Nursing Federation and in 2010 was elected president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

Experience in both healthcare and union work have influenced her priorities for the role going forward.

“I'm interested in healthcare for [culturally and linguistically diverse] groups, for our migrant communities, for our LGBTIQ communities for people who, for various reasons, have really serious barriers in accessing the healthcare system, particularly the primary health care system,” Ms Kearney says.