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Colette McGrath wins 2025 Hepatitis NSW Cheryl Burman Award
The Cheryl Burman Award is named in honour of former community activist and leader, teacher, mother, Hepatitis NSW Board member and President – Cheryl Burman, who died on 9 August 2011 after a long and difficult struggle with hepatitis C- related liver disease.
As President, Cheryl led the then Hepatitis C Council of NSW through a difficult time, putting her great people skills and wisdom, sharp intellect, heartfelt passion and great leadership capabilities to excellent use.
The Award is presented to an individual or group who have done outstanding work in NSW in the fight against viral hepatitis. This could be in the advancement of treatment, support, information provision, prevention, or management for people living with viral hepatitis.
This year’s award went to Colette McGrath (left). Colette is an incredible health professional who has delivered clinical excellence throughout her career via numerous and various initiatives and services in NSW Local Health Districts and Justice Health NSW. Colette was awarded for her lifetime work delivering health services to marginalised people and her leadership role in eliminating hepatitis C within NSW prisons.
Colette has worked in the nursing, drug and alcohol, harm minimisation, BBV/HIV & STI sector most of her working life, commencing in the 1980s in a community drug team in North London. Of those times Colette said “It was early days in the HIV epidemic, news was scanty, myths and fear were everywhere, and stigma and discrimination was rife”. She says “I was horrified how some staff treated people who were gay, haemophiliac and those who injected drugs. Hepatitis C, or as we knew it then Non-A/Non-B, was around but we were oblivious to how it was transmitted then.”
After migrating to Australia in 1994, Colette worked at Kirketon Road Centre (KRC), then as the Clinical Services Manager of the brave new Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) followed by the HARP Unit in SESLHD. Colette worked with people across Health and NGOs such as Hepatitis NSW, ACON, NUAA, Positive Life NSW and BGF to name a few throughout her career. Most recently, Colette was the General Manager Population and Preventative Health, Justice Health NSW until her retirement in August this year.
Colette is a highly respected health professional and has been described by others in the field as “the giant on whose shoulders we stand.” Colette led innovation within the services she worked for in developing clinical and outreach models and building community development and peer workers into service design. Colette was a pioneer in integrating peer workers and community development into clinical models, ensuring marginalised populations received care in environments they could trust. Her leadership helped transform outreach and clinical services into inclusive, community-driven models. These services, such as KRC under Ingrid van Beek’s leadership, were focused on delivering to marginalised people in locations they could access, without stigma.
From 2016 Collette recognised that prisons would be a key focus for hepatitis C elimination efforts and moved to work in Justice Health. Colette took a leadership role in eliminating hepatitis C within NSW correctional facilities. In her work with Justice Health, within the prison system, she ensured follow up of patients as they moved around in the custodial setting to ensure testing and treatment follow up. She led the implementation of the micro elimination model of testing and treating people in custody, to create wings or pods, or entire correctional centres that were, in effect, hep C free, creating communities of people who had been cured.
Her work in the response to COVID in prisons was innovative, delivered with urgency and is credited with preventing infections amongst the population and the staff. Colette is credited with giving the elimination of hep C in prisons “a red hot go” and built and rebuilt the team to orientate to new testing, treatment options and models of care. Both KRC and Justice Health staff state that they ‘couldn’t achieve what they’ve achieved without her counsel and support. By any measure, Colette is a very worthy recipient of this prestigious award.
