After eight years on the Board, Oceania Healthcare has farewelled independent director Sally Evans, a champion for residents, whose influence will be felt long after her departure.
Sally joined the Oceania Board in 2018. During her tenure, she chaired the People & Culture Committee and the Sustainability Committee, and served on the Clinical and Health & Safety Committee.
She led the development of Oceania’s first comprehensive sustainability strategy, a framework that still guides how the company designs, builds and operates its villages and care homes. Her leadership also helped pave the way for Franklin Village to become the first retirement village in New Zealand to achieve a 4 Star Green Star Communities rating.
Sally’s path into the sector was a unique one. Having begun her career as a dietitian in the hospital system, she confronted the state of aged care first-hand. “The first time I walked into a ward caring for frail older people, I thought, this isn’t good enough,” Sally recalled. “It became a real driver for me.” She went on to spend more than three decades in health and aged care across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and Asia, working on both the investment and operational sides of the sector, before bringing that breadth of perspective to Oceania’s Board.
Throughout, her focus stayed firmly on the people at the heart of it. “I’ve visited hundreds of communities, and I love talking to residents,” she said. “There is always something they can tell you about what matters to them, and it is almost always the small moments.”
For Sally, it was a belief drawn from life as much as from the boardroom. She often pointed to her own father’s final days in hospital to illustrate her conviction. Sally shared that he had stopped eating, and the nurses asked her mother to bring in something he might enjoy. Her mother arrived with crayfish from a family friend, a bottle of wine and some good bread. The staff found a quiet corner, laid a sheet over a table so it looked like a tablecloth, and set the two of them up for one last meal together. “It cost them nothing,” Sally reflected. For her, that was the whole point: the moments that matter most are often the smallest, and good care means helping people have them.
Oceania Board Chair Elizabeth Coutts paid tribute to her contribution. “Sally has been a tireless and clear-eyed advocate for our residents and their families. From her very first day, she governed with their safety and wellbeing at the centre of every decision. When she joined, she asked just one thing of us: that we never call the places our residents live ‘facilities’, because a facility is not a home. That insistence, that language matters and the resident always comes first, is the standard she held us to. She made the case, time and again, that caring for residents well is the foundation of a strong business, and she leaves Oceania a more thoughtful company. The Board is deeply grateful for all she has given.”
A leading figure in aged care on both sides of the Tasman, Sally has also held advisory roles with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and the anti-ageism campaign EveryAGE Counts, and was an inaugural member of the Australian Aged Care Financing Authority. In 2018 she was named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence.
Asked what she would most want residents to take from her time at Oceania, her answer was simple: “I want people to feel confident to ask for what matters to them, because almost always, what they ask for is something small.”
Oceania thanks Sally for her years of service and wishes her every success in the future.
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