Dr. Deborah Cole

Board Member

Chair - AusHealth

Dr Deborah Cole is a Board Director at HumanAbility, bringing over two decades of executive and governance leadership across healthcare, community services and workforce development.

Deborah is currently Chair of AusHealth and a Board Director at Western Health, Frontier Advisors and Forensicare. As Chair of the Quality & Safety Committee at Western Health, she has championed safe, high-quality care for one of Victoria's largest and most diverse patient populations.A former Chief Executive Officer of Dental Health Services Victoria, Deborah led transformational change across public health services, earning international recognition for her work in value-based healthcare. She also served as Chair of the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association for eight years, driving national reform in public and not-for-profit healthcare.

Deborah's governance expertise spans financial services, with nine years as a Trustee Director and Deputy Chair at HESTA, the superannuation fund serving over a million health and community services workers. She holds an MBA, Bachelor of Dental Surgery and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

As a Board Director, Deborah brings deep expertise in strategic planning, system reform, risk management, and safety and quality — all in direct service of the workforces that HumanAbility exists to support. 

 

HumanAbility collaborates with industry to conduct research, identify job market demands, assess skill requirements, create adaptive qualifications and training packages, and spearhead workforce development initiatives.

Stay informed

Latest News

Traineeships in Aged Care and Disability: What the industry told us

HumanAbility convened a roundtable of industry stakeholders to explore how traineeship models can better serve the aged care and disability workforce, here's what we heard.

Read More
Informing the conversation on worker registration

HumanAbility is proud to release Registering Care and Support Workers in Australia: International and Local Learnings, a new paper co-authored with international researcher and expert Professor Shereen Hussein.

Read More
Workforce mapping: the cornerstone of qualification reviews

Quality training begins with an understanding of what the industry and workforces need from their employees. That's why we begin all our qualification reviews with the functional analysis process.

Read More