Professor Kaye Basford has recently been announced as one of the Queen’s Birthday Award Honourees for 2020 and has been a member of the Ipswich Hospital Foundation Board since 2018. We took this chance to sit down with Kaye after the announcement she’d been an award recipient to talk about her experience with the Foundation, her work and her life outside Academia.
After giving up her lifelong hobby of playing basketball a few years ago, Kaye was keen to find an athletic replacement when she was introduced to the Foundation’s Fit4Life through a friend.
Subsequently, she made her way on to the board.
Having been an integral member of the board, she became Deputy Chair in 2019, and now she sits in her role as Acting Chair for the Foundation.
“I stopped playing basketball and felt I needed to do some physical activity and what they run is a whole variety of physical activities. To me, Fit4Life is an excellent program to offer the community, so I went along and was told they were looking for new members of the Board. I applied, and that’s how I got on the Board.”
The people she works with and their shared passion for health are what she loves most about her time with the Foundation.
“Our purpose at the Foundation is to promote a healthy lifestyle, but also provide better health care outcomes for our community by helping people in the West Moreton Health system.”
For Kaye, she made mention of how important it is to be able to give back to the community, and how volunteering with the Foundation is such a great place to do it as it provides so many different avenues for a plethora of skillsets.
“People can volunteer in different ways, they can volunteer to help children, they can volunteer to help the hospital by just going and talking to people. We’ve got people who help in accounting and marketing. There are lots of different volunteering experiences.”
Despite her hectic schedule outside of the Foundation and her many other involvements, she still finds time to get back to nature and appreciate the beautiful country in which we live, opting for camping and 4WDing over nights out in the city.
“We’ve been involved in camping and 4WDing and had campervans for over 25 years. Australia is so fortunate to have such a fantastic country and when we started visiting places overseas, we decided we really needed to see more of our own country.”
The comradery and mateship of the Australian culture are fiercely apparent to her when she travels remotely, making her proud of the country she comes from and recognising her fortune to be able to live here.
At the end of the day, though, Kaye’s advice to success is to find happiness in the work that you do, without it, you will never truly have success.
“You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. If opportunities come your way, you should take advantage of them, in the sense that you accept the challenges they offer. I believe that you have to have fun and enjoy your job, as it is a big part of your life.”
