Official Opening and Blessing of the Ritchie Family Centre for Supportive and Palliative Care and the Duncan Family Day Surgery Centre, at Mater Hospital North Sydney
Tuesday, 10 March 2026
Mater Hospital Healing Garden, Wollstonecraft
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC
Thank you, Richard[1]
I also thank Raymond[2] for his warm Welcome to Country that began this evening’s proceedings and pay my respects to the traditional owners of this land.
When Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross moved to the United States in 1958, she was shocked by the treatment of dying patients in the US hospital system. As she recalled in a 1983 BBC interview, “Patients who were terminally ill were literally left alone, nobody talked to them.”[3]
Dr Kübler-Ross set about to change the experience of dying, beginning with a series of ground-breaking seminars for medical students that featured interviews with dying patients on their feelings about death.
From this came her seminal work, On Death and Dying in which she elucidated her theory on how people process significant loss, including their anticipated death, commonly known as the ‘5 stages of grief’.[4]
In 1972, the surgical oncologist Dr Balfour Mount attended one of Dr Kübler-Ross’s lectures, in which she spoke about her work and the inadequacies of treatment for the terminally ill.[5]
Dr Mount was struck by Dr Kübler-Ross’s research, cognisant that “70% of us … die in institutions”[6] where treatment was variable. In 1975, after working for a period at St Christopher’s Hospice for the Terminally Ill in London,[7] he introduced a program at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal[8], which is generally recognised as the world’s first Palliative Care Unit.[9]
In deciding on the nomenclature of ‘Palliative Care’ Dr Mount eschewed the word ‘Hospice’, which, in a “Francophile milieu” like Montreal, carried too negative a connotation.[10] Rather, he looked to the Latin palliare, literally ‘to cover with a cloak’, which had been taken up by medical practitioners in the 15th century to mean alleviating symptoms.[11] In Dr Mount’s own words… “With that in mind, I thought of the word ‘to palliate,’ meaning “to improve the quality of.”[12]
Dr Mount had thus not only named the branch of medical care to which he would devote the rest of his life, he had also defined its raison d’être… the provision of holistic modes of care that raise the quality of life of those with life limiting illnesses.
Half a century later, palliative care is a vital aspect of patient care. It is much more that providing a place to die at the final stage of a person’s life. It adds immeasurably to a person’s quality of life. The research is that palliative care, accessed early, extends a person’s life[13] and results in patients having 25% less chance of an ED visit, almost 50% less chance of a chemotherapy in the last 30 days of life, 30% less chance of a long stay in hospital, and were almost 2.5 times more likely to die outside an acute hospital bed, amongst other benefits.[14]
Thank you, Mater Hospital, for creating a facility, the Ritchie Family Centre for Supportive and Palliative Care, where, in what in many ways is one of the most important times of a person’s life, dignity is accompanied by the best possible treatment.
The second centre being opening tonight is the Duncan Family Day Surgery Centre. Day surgery is also a relatively recent innovation in surgical care—Australia’s first purpose-built day surgery was opened in Dandenong, in 1982.[15] Today, in NSW there are some 115 Licensed day-only facilities.[16]
It is anticipated that this year, less complicated surgeries will overwhelmingly be performed as day surgeries.[17] To give just two examples: last year’s target of 60% of inguinal hernia repairs in NSW public hospitals to be performed as day surgeries was lifted, this year, to 90%. Similarly with mastectomies, the day surgery target was lifting from 50% to 75%.[18]
Importantly, with the opening of these two state-of-the-art centres, St Vincent’s Bringing Care Home strategy[19] is further enhanced, delivering high-quality, connected, and patient-centred care close to where people live.
Over the last 25 years, the Friends of the Mater Foundation has raised more than $85 million for the Hospital; of the $42 million spent on these two new centres, $18.5 million has been provided by the Friends of the Mater, with significant contributions from the Ritchie, Duncan, and Van Norton-Poche families.
These two facilities are a palpable demonstration of what can—and here at the Mater does—happen when two things come together… vision and generosity. The vision saw the need. Generosity enabled the vision to be realised.
[1] Mr Richard Ryan, Chief Executive Officer, St Vincent’s Private Hospitals
[2] Mr Raymond Weatherall, Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.
[3] Lucy Burns, ‘Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The Rise and Fall of the Five Stages of Grief’, BBC online, 3 July 2020, available here
[4] On the ubiquity of Dr Kübler-Ross’s framework: “They've been referenced in TV series from Star Trek to Sesame Street. They’ve been parodied in cartoons, and they've also inspired hundreds of musicians and artists. Thousands of academic papers have been written applying the stages to a huge range of emotional experiences, from athletes dealing with career-ending injuries to Apple consumers responding to the iPhone 5:” ibid.
[5] Bryan Sisk, Juston N Baker, ‘The Underappreciated Influence of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on the Development of Palliative Care for Children’, American Journal of Bioethics, vol.19, no.12, 2019, available here
[6] ‘[Interview Transcript of] Balfour Mount Oral History’, 1 August 2019, Washington University School of Medicine website, available here
[7] ibid. St Christopher’s was founded in 1967 by Dame Cicely Saunders in 1967. “Born 22 June 1918 in Barnet, Hertfordshire, Dame Cicely trained as a nurse, a medical social worker and finally as a physician. Involved with the care of patients with terminal illness since 1948, she lectured widely on this subject, wrote many articles and contributed to numerous books. Dame Cicely founded St Christopher’s Hospice in 1967 as the first hospice linking expert pain and symptom control, compassionate care, teaching and clinical research. St Christopher’s has been a pioneer in the field of palliative medicine, which is now established worldwide:” ‘Dame Cicely Saundres’, St Christopher’s Hospice website, available here
[8] “I thought after hearing Elisabeth that it should be a simple thing to do a study examining these issues at the Royal Victoria Hospital [in Montreal] … I was confident that our hospital provided excellent care. As a result, we did a study… What our study demonstrated was the significant unmet needs of the terminally ill: poor pain and symptom control and inadequate attention to the complex needs of the therapeutic triad (By that, I'm meaning the patient, family members, and caregivers)… The findings were disturbing and my recommendation was that we develop a program to address the unmet needs we had uncovered: ‘[Interview Transcript of] Balfour Mount Oral History’, 1 August 2019, Washington University School of Medicine website, available here.
[9] ‘Tribute to Dr Balfour Mount, Pioneer of Palliative Care (1939-2025), 2 October 2025, Hospice UK website, available here
[10] ‘[Interview Transcript of] Balfour Mount Oral History’, 1 August 2019, Washington University School of Medicine website, available here
[12] ‘[Interview Transcript of] Balfour Mount Oral History’, 1 August 2019, Washington University School of Medicine website, available here
[13] Associate Professor Chris Schilling, quoted in ‘Early Palliative Care Eases Suffering at End of Life’, ABC Radio National Health Report segment, 24 January 2026, available here. Although palliative care’s focus is not the extension of life but rather increase in the quality of life, nevertheless, “some studies show that if symptoms such as pain are controlled, people will feel better and may live longer or be able to tolerate cancer treatment for longer”: Cancer Council, Understanding Palliative Care, December 2023, available here
[14] Associate Professor Chris Schilling, quoted in ‘Early Palliative Care Eases Suffering at End of Life’, ABC Radio National Health Report segment, 24 January 2026, available here. Professor Schilling, from the Centre for Palliative Care at the University of Melbourne, was lead author on a study into the impact of early palliative care on the quality of end-of-life care: Chris Schilling, Olivia Wawryk, Anna Collins, Vijaya Sundararajan, Brian H. Le, and Jennifer Philip, ‘Early Palliative Care and Quality of End-of-Life for People With Terminal Cancer, Victoria, 2018-2023: A Retrospective, Population-Based Cohort Study’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol.224, no.1, 2026, published online 14 January 2026 here
[15] Lindsay Roberts, ‘[Review] Day Surgery—National and International: From the Past to the Future’, Journal of Ambulatory Surgery, vo.12, 2005, p.143. The first Public Day Surgery Unit was opened at Campbelltown Hospital in 1984: ‘History of Camden and Campbelltown Hospitals’, available here
[17] Currently, the percentage of high volume short stay (HVSS) surgery, defined as planned surgeries or procedures which require patients to be admitted for up to 72 hours, in NSW public hospitals sits at just over 80%: ‘About High Volume Short Stay Surgery’, NSW Health website, available here. Given that many day procedures are performed in private or stand-alone day surgery facilities, the overall proportion of day surgery to in-hospital procedures is likely much greater