Luka’s a physio. Her first job out of uni was in private practice in Adelaide, the same clinic group she’d been a patient at, cos they were associated with her netball club growing up. She walked into the “interview” and they really just started talking about when she’d start. Three or four years in:
“So I started to feel like this itch once I was probably my busiest as a clinician, but there just wasn’t a lot of that challenge clinically… I’m really enjoying this, but I’ve got more to offer. There’s more of me. I’ve got more value to add to an organisation than just delivery of care”
What she did about it still took a few years, and the first two moves saw her stay inside the same organisation.
First was two days a week at setting up a new clinic the group was opening, working alongside the director. What she found was that she loved making the place actually work; building the referral network, the letterbox drops, the sponsoring of local sports teams and the systems underneath all of it.
Her second step was into a team leader role in the same group’s home care and aged care arm, still carrying a full clinical caseload underneath it. The thing she got a real kick out of was being allowed to fully arrange her own schedule, which patients in which order.
The business was acquired a while later and merged into something bigger, but the values stopped matching. So on maternity leave with her second son, she asked a previous boss to be a referee as she was planning to apply to some different NDIS roles.
As fate would have it, he’d just started as CEO of a knee-recovery device company, and he said yep happy to be a referee, but let’s have a chat about this new gig instead. The potential role was clinical manager. The only catch was the company only had twelve months runway, and beyond that nothing was promised. Which is a strange thing to hear when you’ve come out of clinical work that is so stable.
She took it, and she was hire number three.
“if 12 months is all it is, then you go back into what you were doing anyway. It’s I guess the luxury that you have as physios that… there’s always gonna be a need for you.”
The money? Marginally more than the team leader role. On why the number wasn’t the thing she was weighing up:
“In private practice, the only way I can earn more is by seeing more people. So like my wage, my salary, my earning capacity was directly linked with my time.”
That was early 2022. She’s now their Product & Strategy Lead, and she’s kept her rego. She calls the whole transition a brain rewiring:
“I think of my transitional journey as a bit of a brain rewiring… [before this role] I didn’t ever challenge the status quo. I didn’t ever think, why is it being done this way?… I was like, tell me what to do and I’ll do it and I’ll do it really well… And now I’m like… I prefer not to exist in someone else’s framework. I want to design that for myself.”
Her advice for anyone five years in and feeling stale is to start exactly where you already are:
“start to challenge yourself to think more innovatively, even just in your initial safe space… because maybe there’s initiatives that you can start doing. And that will also look good on your CV”
Next: four things you can start while still employed clinically, none of them needing a resignation.
This first went out to Post-MDT subscribers on 20 September 2026. You can read the original edition in the archive, or get the next one in your inbox.
Subscribe to the Post-MDT newsletter
Every post here went to subscribers first. Get the next one in your inbox.
You're in. The next one lands in your inbox.