Lum Interview Introduction

Welcome to the Leadership Corner.  My name is Ky Luu, and I am the Executive Director for the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy at Tulane University.  The Leadership Corner is a forum where leaders from the non-governmental organizations, United Nations, local, and national authorities, and other stakeholders can come together to share their experiences, their insight, and their motivations to provide support to individuals and communities affected by natural and manmade disasters.  Our guest today is Dr. Gary Lum, who is the Assistant Secretary for the Health Emergency Management branch in the Australian government’s Department of Health and Aging.  Dr. Lum also serves as the Incident Coordinator for Australia’s National Incident Room, a government entity that is activated in times of health emergencies. Most recently, the National Incident Room was activated in response to the H1N1 virus.  Prior to his current position, Dr. Lum served at the Royal Darwin Hospital, where he was the Acting General Manager during the time of the Bali bombing evacuation operation of  2002.  He was later honored by being appointed a member of the Order of Australia for his service during this operation.  As Assistant Secretary and Incident Coordinator, Dr. Lum has played a key role in the adaptation of Australia’s health management plan for pandemic influenza, and specifically in the government’s development of a new phase of the plan called “PROTECT”.  Dr. Lum, welcome to the Leadership Corner. 

Gary Lum:  Hello Ky, thank you very much for asking me to participate in this interview.

Ky Luu: Thank you for participating.  Dr.Lum, you studied medicine at the University of Queensland and you begin your medical career working in clinical microbiology and pathology.  What brought you from clinical practice to working for the Department of Health and Aging? 

Gary Lum:  Ky, that part of my life during medical school, I put myself through by working in a pathology laboratory, and that basically guided me to wanting to work in laboratory medicine, and I’ve always had a keen interest in the clinical side of medicine but being attuned to microbiology and pathology brought out in me the desire to not just look after patients at the bedside, which is not always possible from the laboratory, but also to manage oversee, supervise, and basically run a pathology service or a microbiology service, and that’s what I’m trying to do as a part of my medical and specialty training, and that’s what I did when I was in Darwin for twelve years as the Director of Pathology Services and the Supervising Pathologist for the Northern Territory government.  My subspecialty is in microbiology, so that gives me a particularly strong interest in infectious diseases and in microbiology, and because I was also a member of the Public Health Laboratory Network, which is a group of laboratory directors, pathologists, and medical laboratory scientists, that were brought together by Australian government nearly twelve years ago now, to act as a forum, to act as a group of experts, to provide advice to Australian and state and territory governments around public health laboratory issues.  I was Deputy Chair for three years and then Chair for three years, and during that time I developed a really strong relationship with colleagues in Australian government.  And it got to the point where I felt that my time in Darwin had come to a close, I had achieved as probably as much as I was going to achieve, in leading the pathology service there, and I felt young enough to take a change in my career, so I had always been interested in bureaucracy, and I thought that if I worked in Australian government I could make a difference at that high level of government end of things.  And so I made inquiries with the various senior executives within the Department of Health and Aging in Canberra, and they were receptive to the idea.So I formally applied for a position, went through the formal interview process, and was fortunate enough to be appointed as an Assistant Secretary within the Senior Executive Service of the Department of Health and Aging.  And since then, I have been able to utilize my skills as a medical practitioner, and also as a pathologist, to oversee and manage a group of fantastic people that I look after in my branch, and who work with me, to accomplish the goals and the missions that we have from a health emergency management perspective.  Having, as you said in the introduction, worked as the Acting General Manager for Royal Darwin hospitals in 2002 during the first  Bali bombings gave me an insight into managing large numbers of people, and also into managing to some degree, a large health emergency.  Darwin being in sub-equatorial Australia, and being prone every year to severe monsoons and tropical cyclones, we would go through an annual preparation cycle.  Having also been involved in some preparation for the year 2000 Sydney Olympics through the Public Health Laboratory Network, and then the awful events that you guys suffered on the 11th of September 2001, and then of course with the Anthrax  (bacillus anthracis) letters A month or so after that, Australians became very attuned to terrorism because of the close relationship with the United States of America, and from a pathology microbiology perspective, we were very interested in the activities related to those letters.  We likewise received many thousands of hoax letters, and also many thousands of investigations because of white powders and suspicious substances, and that sparked a strong interest not just in clinical microbiology, but also in bio-threat, bioterrorism, pathogen security, and that is also what partly led me to desire a change in what I was doing, and my move to Canberra, which I have to say the weather is significantly different to sub-equatorial Darwin, and here I am.  I am sorry for the long-winded response, but that basically summarizes I think why I made the move.  

Ky Luu:  As a following question, I know it’s always difficult to compare and contrast leadership styles, especially when we are comparing the differences between the public and the private sector, but based upon your experiences in Darwin and your leap into bureaucracy, can you perhaps compare and contrast some of the different styles you have noticed?

Gary Lum:  Yes, definitely.  I have always seen myself as going through my formal education to become a manager, and not necessarily a leader.  When I was in Darwin, I was exposed to a number of people who, while they were also trained in management, they were also born leaders in many ways, and while I think you can be born a leader, you can also develop leadership skills, and I certainly took on board some of the traits and also modified my own behavior, and tried to turn myself into someone who could lead as well as manage, as well as oversee a body of work.  And so I was exposed fortunately, and was mentored by a number of people in Brisbane where I did my initial training, and mainly in Darwin where one particular individual, Dr. Len Notaras, who at the time was Medical Superintendant and who had a military as well as academic history background to medicine provided me with the mentoring to become a leader.