The award-winner who transformed end-of-life care

An isolating family caregiving experience became the catalyst for Emeritus Professor Margaret O’Connor AM’s passion to transform Australian palliative care and earning the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award.

In the mid-1970s, a young nursing student returned to her family home to care for her father, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. There were no home nursing services back then. Just her and a GP she called on when things got desperate.

“The thing I have never forgotten was how isolating and honest it was looking after someone,” Margaret recalls now, decades and an entire career between the overwhelmed nursing student she was then and the pioneering professional she is today.

“I remember very clearly thinking, I just haven’t got the energy to wash my hair,” she says.

A career to change it all

What she couldn’t have known then was that this period of exhaustion and isolation would drive a career that would transform palliative care in Australia.

Margaret received the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Palliative Care Awards, with CEO Camilla Rowland describing her as having “helped shape the field for over four decades”.

Misdiagnosed but not misaligned

After months of round-the-clock care, Margaret discovered her father had been misdiagnosed. He went on to live another ten years. But those months of caregiving had already left their mark, cementing her resolve.

“That was a really seminal experience, and it stayed with me,” she says. It wasn’t until five or six years later that she saw a position at Sydney Mission and thought: ‘There’s that job’.

A fortuitous opportunity, the role offered something that would become her trademark approach: working autonomously in the community, directly with families in their homes. “I love that autonomy,” she explains. There’s opportunity to work independently while expanding your skillset but support is only a phone call away.

More importantly, it meant collaborating within a multidisciplinary team, working towards a shared goal. “It wasn’t just nurses, it was lots of other people, and we did it all together.”

Something from nothing

If there’s one thing that defines Margaret’s career more than any other, it’s recognising opportunity and seizing it. She helped establish home-based palliative care services in areas of Melbourne that had none, always arriving “at the right time” as she puts it.

In 2005, she received an Order of Australia honour for her contribution to the development of palliative care in Victoria. In 2012, she was awarded Life Membership of Palliative Care Victoria; and Palliative Care Nurses Australia named an oration in her honour.

While professional recognition has stacked up over the years, Margaret will tell you it wasn’t handed to her on a silver platter.

As a former board member of Palliative Care Australia, she witnessed the Australian New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine secure their place at the table while nurses remained excluded.

“I just thought it wasn’t right,” she says with a shrug.

It was an injustice that sparked action. She pushed to establish Palliative Care Nurses Australia, fighting for nursing representation on the national board alongside doctors. Hers was a pragmatic argument: “You’re not going to get a successful palliative care conference if the nurses don’t come.”

In time they won their place, though not without steadfast persistence and constitutional changes.

A revolution in a bottle

Ask what she feels the most significant evolution in palliative care was and, rather than cite policy changes or institutional reform, Margaret points to something startlingly practical: long-acting morphine.

“Before that, we had bottles of morphine liquid in people’s homes, and you had to wake up every three or four hours. So not only was the person suffering, but the carer had to make sure it was administered during the night.”

With the invention of slow-release morphine, followed by syringe drivers, it was a revolution that was ‘absolutely liberating’.

It’s a response emblematic of her approach; an understanding that systemic change often comes through addressing the most basic, human needs.

Success in practice and research

Margaret says her proudest achievement arrived late in her career. She held the Vivian Bullwinkel Chair in Palliative Care Nursing at Monash University from 2002 until 2014, describing it as ‘right out of my comfort zone’. As a professorship with lofty expectations, she found herself in a balancing act between academic demands and clinical relevance.

Still, she and her team succeeded in creating “research that was always clinically relevant, very much applied research, working with clinical partners to make sure whatever we did was going to be relevant to them.”

In 2014, the University appointed her as Emeritus Professor in recognition of her contribution to both research and practice. Work that’s effectively influenced palliative care policy not just nationally but internationally, with her research cited more than 5,000 times in academic literature.

Passing the torch

When it comes to practical wisdom, Margaret’s advice to the next generation is reflective of the inimitable pragmatism that’s defined her career. Rather than an idealistic call to transform the field of palliative care, her focus is on adaptation. “Whatever systems we have, we need to make sure people are getting the best care they can at the end of life.”

She advocates for broad experience before specialising, pursuing specialised qualifications and attending conferences. “Why not? They’re fun,” she says with characteristic directness.

Looking back, that young nursing student who once felt too drained to wash her hair built a career ensuring other families would never know such loneliness. In the end, her greatest achievement wasn’t what she built, but what she eliminated: the isolation that started it all.

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This articloe was written by Sarah Vercoe and was first published on the PCA website and is republished here with permission.