Celebrating 20 Years with Nursing Australia: Kavita as Relationship Manager for NSW and the ACT
There's a particular kind of person who stays somewhere for twenty years. Not someone who got comfortable; someone who kept finding reasons to stay interested. This year, we're celebrating two decades with one of those people: Kavita Isherwood, our Client and Employee Relationship Manager for New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
How Kavita’s Career at Nursing Australia Began in 2006
Kavita joined Nursing Australia in 2006 as a Nursing Services Manager, looking after a region of Sydney. The shape of the work then looked a lot like the shape of the work now: visiting clients, understanding their staffing needs, recruiting nurses to match. In between, she’staken detours through permanent recruitment and into community and disability care, broadening her view of healthcare from the inside, before returning to Nursing Australia last year.
Today, she looks after Nursing Australia’s nurses and clients across the whole of NSW and the ACT. On any given day, that means understanding what hospitals, aged care facilities, and community providers need and matching them with the right nurses from our workforce. It’s a role that lives at the intersection of relationship-building, clinical judgement, and the unglamorous logistics of healthcare staffing. She’s good at all three.
Life Outside the Office
Most weekends, Kavita is somewhere between a basketball stadium and a soccer field, watching her two kids play. There’s also Sandy, the family’s Groodle, an unofficial fifth family member who keeps everyone busy in the way only a beautiful, demanding dog can.
From Clinical Nursing to Healthcare Recruitment
Before any of the recruitment work, Kavita was a clinical nurse. The move out of clinical practice came down to one honest reason: shift work.
“As a young 20-year-old, I was working night shifts while my friends were out socialising. I wanted a better work–life balance at that stage of my life.”
The clinical background hasn’t gone anywhere, though. She still draws on it every day.
“It helps me understand what clients are looking for in an agency nurse, and equally, it allows me to understand the experience from the nurse’s perspective when they’re sent into different hospitals. I can set realistic expectations, provide better support, and help both sides navigate the challenges more effectively.”
How Agency Nursing Has Changed Over Twenty Years
Twenty years is long enough to watch an industry transform. When Kavita joined, healthcare facilities leaned heavily on agency nurses. Now, many organisations have built their own internal casual workforce teams and rely on agencies less. The agencies that win in this environment are the ones adapting, building real relationships, and constantly looking for new opportunities – a description that fits the way Kavita works almost too neatly.
Ask her what nurses actually want from an agency partner, and there’s no hesitation. Honesty.
“Some agencies focus on recruiting just to meet key performance indicators (KPIs), but that can leave nurses disappointed, without shifts, and feeling like they’ve wasted their time. I’ve always believed in being upfront and honest, so nurses know exactly what they’re getting when they join Nursing Australia.”
It’s a quietly radical answer in an industry where over-promising is the easy path. It’s also probably part of why she’s still here twenty years later, and part of why so many of the nurses she’s placed are too.
The BBQ That Sparked Lifelong Friendships
Of all the stories Kavita tells about her two decades here, one keeps coming back.
Years ago, she recruited a group of nurses from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scotland who were in Australia on working holiday visas. To help them meet each other in a new country, she organised a BBQ. A friendship group formed that afternoon, five of them, mostly, and stayed inseparable.
“I’ve kept in touch with them on social media, and it’s been incredible to watch their journey unfold: travelling together, meeting their partners, getting married, having kids, even standing as bridesmaids in each other’s weddings. That whole friendship circle started from one simple catch-up I organised. That makes it very special to me.”
A whole web of lifelong friendships, marriages, and milestones, all traced back to one Saturday afternoon she organised so a few homesick nurses could meet. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t appear on a KPI report, and yet, somehow, is the actual job.
What Has Kept Kavita at Nursing Australia for Two Decades
When you ask Kavita why she’s stayed, the answer is short and unsurprising: the people.
“There are people in this business I genuinely could not do my job without. We are a strong team that looks out for each other.”
She talks about colleagues who’ve been here for as long as she has, sometimes longer. About the support she’s had from the team through challenging seasons of her own life, the kind of support, she says, she’ll never forget. And about the nurses themselves: hearing their stories, helping them find shifts that fit the lives they’re trying to build, watching careers unfold over years.
That last part is, in her own words, the thing that has kept the work interesting after twenty years. Not the industry, not the systems, not the strategy decks. The nurses.
Kavita’s Twenty Years, Summed Up
We asked her to sum it up. She did, and it’s hard to improve on:
“It has been a journey of building lasting relationships, supporting nurses and clients through every challenge, and taking pride in making a genuine difference in healthcare every single day.”
From all of us at Nursing Australia, thank you, Kavita. Twenty years of honest conversations, real relationships, and the kind of quiet, consistent showing-up that makes a workplace what it is. We’re incredibly lucky to have you on the team.