Professor EmeritaMary Chiarella

Professor Mary Chiarella is Professor of Nursing at Sydney Nursing School and an internationally renowned nurse leader with a distinguished career in nursing services. She has qualifications in Nursing, Midwifery and Law and conducts research covering three broad themes: (a) safety & quality (b) law, ethics and regulatory issues; and (c) improvements in nursing practices/models of care. Professor Chiarella’s over-40-year career began as a clinical nurse in the UK. She established the world’s first postgraduate degree in midwifery (Doctor of Midwifery) at UTS, which has been completed by many of Australia’s and New Zealand’s current midwifery leaders. In 2001, as Foundation Professor of Nursing at Corrections Health (now Justice Health) with UTS, she was instrumental in developing key competence requirements for the organisation’s nurses and in the official recognition of a new scope of practice for Nurse Practitioners in NSW, the Justice Health Nurse Practitioner. As Chief Nursing Officer for NSW Health (2003-2004) she helped achieve a significant increase in the number of Nurse Practitioners in NSW and initiated the development of the framework for the first publically-funded home-birth midwifery program in NSW. During her time as Chair of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council, she led the regulatory negotiations for nurses and midwives within the new national registration scheme. In 2008, Professor Chiarella was invited to the WHO Nursing and Midwifery Directorate, Geneva, to develop a compendium of nurse-led Primary Health Care models including a review of global models of care from 38 countries.In 2009, she was one of three independent board members of Health Workforce Australia appointed by the then Commonwealth Government Health Minister Nicola Roxon. From 2009 to 2015 she was the NSW practitioner representative on the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) and Chair of the Policy Committee of the NMBA. She is a Member (representing nursing) of the Clinical Ethics Advisory Council for NSW Health

Professor Chiarella was formerly a member of the NSW Law Reform Commission Division Working Group on minors' consent to medical treatment. She was a founding member of both the Australian Bioethics Association and the Australian Institute for Health, Law and Ethics.