Passion project sees Chris Moore shine as a leader
Heading up the eHealth NSW Digital Academy, a training platform designed to upskill staff, Chris Moore shows all the qualities of a natural leader. He is genuine, authentic and supportive of his team and colleagues.
Filling the role of Associate Director, Portfolio Support Services - Service Delivery at eHealth NSW, Chris counts the Digital Academy - which has already delivered more than 10,000 training sessions - as a genuine passion project and a career highlight.
“We started off with some small cloud training, to now growing it to something that is being discussed internationally. In the last year especially, we have had a lot of momentum,” says Chris.
Academy delivers step change for training
The Digital Academy is one of the largest of its kind in Australia and is designed to accelerate the digital health workforce of the future through virtual, face-to-face, experiential, and self-paced learning experiences.
Showcased in presentations delivered as far away as Las Vegas, its training streams include agile, analytics, cloud, customer centricity, human centered design, integration and interoperability, safety and quality, and service management.
More than 85% of eHealth NSW staff have completed at least one module and it is now being expanded across NSW Health.
“The scale of it has been different to anything I’ve done in terms of the learning and development space – this is just next level and there’s so much opportunity to innovate,” says Chris.
Royal Air Force offers formative direction
Working in an IT training environment focused on Cloud and Agile, and delivering a successful learning platform may be second nature to Chris now, but it was not always the case, with his early career in the UK’s Royal Air Force.
Chris started as a loadmaster, ensuring the right cargo went on the right aircraft. It is a role that included a stint as a crew chief on Chinook helicopters - a job he credits with some of the leadership skills he uses today.
“That was quite formative for me really. I saw some good and not so good leadership in pressure situations.”
Family leads to career and country change
Chris’ transition from the UK to Australia, and eventually to eHealth NSW, began when he found himself on his own in England, with his whole family having already migrated to Australia.
He used the decision to relocate down under as an opportunity to also reset his path, by choosing a complete career change.
Chris joined NSW Health’s Health Education and Training Institute (HETI), making the transition to project management at the same time.
Having undertaken various technical projects with the RAF, many in the IT space, the switch was an easy one.
He joined eHealth NSW in 2017, but it is his family he credits most with the change. Both his mum and sister are nurses, which has influenced his perceptions of health IT infrastructure, and what he sees as opportunities for improvement.
“It’s made me focused on the end user, and figuring out what their challenge is, how we can fix it and working back from there.”
Award recognition a team effort
In late 2022, Chris won the Chief Executive’s Award for Leadership at the annual eHealth NSW Awards. It is recognition of his success, but he is keen to credit the people around him for making him the leader he is today.
“Leadership is about empowering people in the team and supporting them. I want to help my team feel they are in control of what they do every day and give them the support to own it.”
Reflecting on the work he has done to date with eHealth NSW, it is the teams he has built, and their achievements that he is most proud of. “We’ve been building capability teams since 2016, and when COVID happened, everything we’d built made a lot of sense,” says Chris.
"Within hours we had people chipping in with the CoVax initiative [the first stage of the eHealth NSW response to COVID]. When I saw members of the training team helping to setup the vaccination centres, it was a special moment.”