Our Story
Clinical foundations
I trained as a nurse and worked across community nursing, aged care, primary care, and specialist allergy, immunology and dermatology clinics. That gave me a solid grasp of chronic and complex conditions, and of how they actually show up in someone's medical history.
Reading records for a living
From there I moved into medicolegal report writing and veteran compensation advocacy, working out of veteran focused medical clinics and ex-service clubs. I built training material and ran education for doctors on diagnostic and permanent impairment assessments, quality checked their reports, and became the person they came to when they were not sure what DVA needed. The more I worked with serving and ex-serving members, the more I found myself drawn to the community, and the more it bothered me to see people let down by the very services meant to be helping them.
Putting it to proper use
Eventually I stopped waiting for it to get better and started COMPASS, putting what I knew to work for a community that had waited long enough. I have worked with a lot of serving and ex-serving members since, many with claims that had been sitting in the too-hard basket.
How COMPASS works now
COMPASS supports current and former ADF personnel remotely, right across Australia. The name comes from the work itself, Compensation, Advocacy, Support and Services. Communication, document handling and case management run through secure Australian-hosted systems. Research runs on our own offline reference tools, which index the legislation and the Statements of Principles.
