Today on Better Student Leaders, Josh sits down with Dr Bridie Mulholland, a proud Jingili woman, Assistant Professor in First Nations Health at Bond University, and winner of the 2025 Queensland Woman in STEM First Nations Award. Bridie shares her unconventional path from postgraduate student leader to academic leader, explaining how her early days in GCAP shaped everything she does now. As she puts it, student leadership was where her “love of leadership began,” a time that “built a very solid foundation for me” and showed her the power of organising for a “good experience of a group of people.”

Bridie then breaks down cultural capability and cultural safety with clarity and honesty. She explains that cultural safety is ultimately about “treating patients as people first and patients second,” and reminds us that “everybody has a culture” made up of their lived experience. She highlights that when systems try to “fit a square in a circle,” they unintentionally exclude people, and that what works for First Nations communities often “actually works for… a very broad range of people.” Her definition of cultural safety is simple but powerful: “no denial of a person’s needs.”

In the final section, Bridie zooms out to the big picture of health, higher education, and society. She shares that these challenges are “really complex issues,” but warns that “we tend to overcomplicate it.” At the heart of it, she says, is ensuring “people have a right to good health… a right to a good education… [and] to feel like a valued member of society.” She reminds future health professionals that medicine “is not a career of social standing… it is a social advocacy career,” and that both educators and clinicians must remain “people first and… academics second” if we want students and communities to thrive.

Learn more about Dr Bridie Mulholland's work here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridie-mulholland/