Anna Colahan with the VAMCHN Fran Morris Award. Photo: supplied
From taking to the skies with the Royal Flying Doctor Service to leading Victoria’s maternal and child health nursing workforce, Anne Colahan’s career has seen ‘lots of good things happen’. The recipient of the 2026 Fran Morris award for services to maternal and child health nursing, Anne chatted to ANMF about where it started, and how it’s going.
‘My mother was a nurse, and my father was a GP,’ Anne begins. ‘So as a teenager I worked a bit in the doctor’s surgery part time. It was something I was interested in. But I’ve always enjoyed people, and I think that’s what ultimately brought me into nursing, along with the thought that hopefully I could make a difference.’
Anne trained at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, and after gaining her registration and some experience she headed to England, where she worked at the Royal Marsden Hospital and National Hospital for two years.
Upon returning to Melbourne, Anne didn’t want to go back into the hospital system so she found a job as a district nurse instead. ‘I think it was just that I saw myself more as a community-type nurse rather than a hospital-based nurse,’ she explains, ‘and I wanted to be able to handle whatever came my way.’
Wanting to be able to handle whatever came her way is also why she then decided to study midwifery, and ultimately to get her triple qualification as a maternal and child health nurse. It also served her well during a stint with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Far North Queensland.
‘I don’t know what I was doing,’ she says with a laugh. ‘But it was great. I look back on it now and think: “Oh my gosh, did I really do that?!” We flew these tiny little planes out of the international airport at Cairns. On my first flight out, I remember getting on the plane and sitting alongside the pilot. We were puttling along the runway, getting ready to take off – and they’re holding up this great big Air India plane while we puttle along!’
Anne ended up flying on tiny planes after she responded to a job ad for a nurse and a midwife. ‘I had to go to Brisbane and re-register because they didn’t have national registration at the time,’ she recalls. ‘It was a totally different experience, and I really enjoyed my time there. It was good to have the extra skills,’ she adds, ‘as I was a bit worried I’d be out the back blocks of Queensland delivering babies or something.’
After once again returning to Melbourne, Anne got a job at the then City of St Kilda in maternal and child health. ‘And I’ve been doing it more or less ever since.’
Life as a maternal and child health nurse, and leader
Now working with the City of Melbourne, Anne’s career as a maternal and child health nurse has been one that she has absolutely loved. As an MCHN, she has done project work for coroner’s inquests; she joined the Maternal and Child Health Line ‘back when it first started years ago’ and met many lifelong friends; and, most surprisingly to her, she got seconded into the Department of Health and ended up managing the Victoria’s entire MCH service.
‘I had co-managed the 24-hour Line, so I had worked in management,’ she reflects, ‘but going into the department was a whole different level. It was very challenging, but something I really liked.
‘I was there when we developed the Ages and Stages Maternal and Child Health Service Guidelines and framework, which we still use today,’ she notes. ‘I know it needs revising, and I agree. But we piloted it back in 2006 and that’s the work that maternal and child health nurses still use today to guide their practice. It was the first time we really had an evidence-based framework for guiding maternal and child health nurses in their practice. So that was quite exciting.’
Anne also oversaw the introduction of the My Health, Learning and Development Record, commonly known as the green book. She is also proud of her work overseeing upskilling nurses. ‘For example, we introduced the family violence common risk assessment framework before MARAM,’ she says, ‘and trained nurses in identifying family violence, which was something that really hadn’t been done before. We also upskilled nurses in safe-sleeping practices around the then SIDS guidelines, and introduced sleep checklists, which families are still using today. We introduced smoking-cessation interventions. We introduced developmental assessment tools, the Peds questionnaire and Brigance.
‘So it was an exciting time. It was a busy time. Did I know what I was doing half the time? Probably not! But I had an amazing team around me and a great set of mentors. And I look back at it every day and think: we did a good job there.’
Recognition with the Fran Morris award
But all good things come to an end, and with the change of government in 2010 Anne was retrenched.
‘It gave me time to reflect a little bit. I thought: I’ve been talking about this framework for years and years. Let’s put it into practice now, and get back into doing it again.’
She returned to a job at City of Melbourne and has been there ever since. But having got a taste of shaping the Victorian MCH sector, Anne wasn’t content to just do the job. She became an ANMF Job Rep because, she says, she’d ‘been on the other side of the fence, negotiating enterprise bargaining agreements within the department, with the nurses on the Line. So I felt that I had quite a bit to offer. I understood the system and how it worked. I felt that I had the skills, and an insight into knowing how it all works.’
She also joined the Victorian Association of Maternal and Child Health Nurses (VAMCHN) committee to help further the advancement of maternal and child health in the state. By 2020 she was elected president. (She was also a representative on the national body, MCaFHNA – or Maternal, Child and Family Health Nurses Australia – where she eventually served as director.)
Having done her ‘hard yards’ as president through COVID, Anne recently decided to hand the baton over. In recognition of her contributions, both to VAMCHN and to maternal and child health more broadly, Anne was also named the 2026 recipient of the Fran Morris Award.
‘I was very humbled to receive it,’ she says. ‘I am so lucky to have chosen a career that I just love, and which has given me so many opportunities.’
