Beverley Head
Friday, 28 October 2011 17:13
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When the discussion turns to e-health Mukesh Haikerwal locks eyes – he rarely glances away but examines your reaction with diagnostic concentration. It’s no doubt a skill honed as a GP, but it is still slightly unnerving.
Government, its agencies, health departments and the IT sector may all on occasion try to stare him down but Haikerwal won’t blink in terms of what he wants from a national e-health programme. As the national clinical lead for Australia’s National E-health Transition Authority (Nehta) Haikerwal is determined that technology can completely reform Australia’s health sector and deliver improved, more sustainable services to Australians.
He has for years fought unsustainable status quos, ever since he was an uppity junior doctor in the UK railing against the long hours forced on young doctors. Today he’s 50 and a highly visible member of the establishment, a former president of the Australian Medical Association, an Officer of the Order of Australia, and was appointed chair of the World Medical Association in April.
That he remains such an engaged and driven professional is particularly remarkable given the fact that in 2008 he was the victim of a senseless attack in Melbourne by a group of thugs which left him literally at death’s door. Haikerwal made a remarkable recovery and is now seemingly more passionate and engaged than ever.
He’s had 40 years to hone both his skills and views having decided at the age of 10 to become a doctor – and specifically a GP.
“I was born in India of Indian heritage in a place called Lucknow which was what the British would call the place of the Indian mutiny and the Indians would call the birth of the independence movement,” says the characteristically forthright Haikerwal. The eldest of three sons (all of whom are married to doctors) born to a an electrical engineer father and biochemist pioneer mother, Haikerwal spent his earliest years in West Africa before moving to boarding school, followed by university, in England.
The youngest medical student of the year at the University of Leicester, Haikerwal immediately plunged into the political fray, becoming the president of the medical student society and later appointed by the British Medical Association as a “card holding union rep” where he was “active in the junior doctor’s movement around hours of work and terms and conditions.”
Haikerwal’s family moved to Australia when he was still in medical school in the UK, and he and his doctor wife followed in 1990 and started a practice in Melbourne’s western suburbs in 1991 which now has a team of seven doctors. He and his wife have also raised three of their own sons, two at school still and one at university.
