Addressing the leadership gap her physio degree left

The Bastas Academy for Health Leadership helped Lucy Chen, a physiotherapist turned Bupa senior leader, build the skills she needed to lead through the complexity of modern healthcare.

When Lucy Chen completed her Bachelors and Masters in Physiotherapy at the University of Melbourne, she expected her career to unfold much like most clinical careers do.

Instead, within a few years she was running her own practice, leading teams and navigating challenges far beyond what she'd learnt in clinical training.

She later moved into larger healthcare organisations at Medibank, working across provider engagement, contracting and national operations before progressing into strategy roles at Bupa.

Today, as Head of Healthcare Programs at Bupa, she is responsible for identifying and designing programs that need to work for customers, clinicians, providers and the business alike.

Over the course of her career, Chen realised that delivering change in healthcare requires a broader set of skills than clinical expertise alone.

“Healthcare is complex, and leading within that complexity takes much more than your technical skills,” Chen said.

This is what lead her to the Bastas Academy for Health Leadership.

A course built for people leading in the health sector

Chen wanted to augment her skills and took one of the inaugural courses offered by the Bastas Academy for Health Leadership, a joint initiative of the University's Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and Melbourne Business School.

The Bastas Academy’s premise is that meeting today's healthcare pressures — workforce shortages, burnout, an ageing population — takes leaders who can work across boundaries and turn ideas into lasting change.

For Chen, the value wasn't filling a gap in technical or commercial knowledge. It was developing the ability to make sense of complexity and better understand the systems that shape healthcare outcomes.

“This course offered a really unique opportunity to learn practical frameworks and ways of thinking that I could apply to my workplace straight away,” Chen said.

“Healthcare is increasingly complex, and these are skills that I don’t think we’ve traditionally invested enough in developing.”

A rare mix of clinical, operational and strategic minds

What stood out to Chen wasn't just the content, but who she learned it alongside.

The course brought together a genuine mix of health leaders — public and private, clinical and academic, operational and strategic — something she'd rarely encountered in her career to that point.

“It's rare to actually sit in a room and learn from other people in healthcare like that,” she said.

"Everyone's carrying different challenges depending on where they sit in the system, but you realise how much you can learn from someone whose day-to-day looks nothing like yours."

“As clinicians, we're trained to focus on solving the problem in front of us. What this course helped me do was step back and better understand the system and people around the problem, the different incentives at play, and why the same issue can look very different depending on where you sit. It changed the way I build a narrative for change,” Chen said.

Filling the skills gap clinical education leaves behind

Professor Robert Saunders, BAHL's inaugural Director said that Lucy’s story is a familiar one.

“Clinical education teaches you the technical skills that make excellent clinical care possible. But the next step — leading a team, a division, an organisation — requires a different skill set: cultivating people, building influence, creating partnerships,” he said.

“Those skills can be learned."

Supporting health leaders in expanding their leadership capabilities, and therefore improving the effectiveness of the entire Australian health sector, is a key goal of the Bastas Academy.

Since launching in 2025 with philanthropic support from Dennis Bastas, BAHL has welcomed more than 300 participants across 10 cohorts, with over 200 scholarships awarded — more than $1.5 million in fee support, aimed particularly at professionals from under-represented backgrounds.

For alumni like Chen, clinical training teaches you how to solve problems.

Leadership training teaches you how to navigate the systems, people and incentives that determine whether those solutions succeed.

Bastas Academy's 2027 course applications are now open. To take your healthcare career to the next level, visit Bastas Academy for Health.