Island doctor

Norfolk Island’s medical superintendent is responsible for the healthcare of the community that raised her.

Story Kellie Floyd   Photo Zach Sanders

Dr Jodie McCoy’s drive to work takes just 10 minutes, but by the time she arrives, she has already exchanged a dozen waves: the cafe owner on the way to work, a childhood neighbour taking children to school and a patient she saw the week before, just to name a few. On an island of just over 2,000 permanent residents, anonymity is rare.

In the South Pacific, 1,600km off the east coast of mainland Australia, Norfolk Island has one multipurpose health service – the Health and Residential Aged Care Service. The service brings together an emergency department, inpatient and support services, a GP and dental clinic, and allied health and residential aged care services. At the centre of it is Jodie, the island’s medical superintendent, and for the past three years she has served as a senior clinician while overseeing the service’s management.

Jodie grew up on this 35sq km island and returned home in 2023, after studying and working on the mainland. As an eighth-generation descendant of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the famous Bounty mutiny, she has a family history woven into the island’s story. She is the first Norfolk Islander to qualify as a doctor and later as an anaesthetist.

Caring for Norfolk Island has long been part of her family story. Jodie’s grandmother was one of the founding nurses at the island hospital, a woman she describes as incredibly caring and resilient. “My mother is also a very intelligent woman who can turn her hand to anything, and my father is a brilliant mechanic,” she says. “Their ability to solve problems and work through solutions has had a huge influence on me.”

Jodie describes her return to the island as “a roll of the dice”. After the pandemic, she took long service leave, returning home with her husband Matt and their daughter, Miri, now 15, and son, Daniel, now 13, to complete a master’s degree in health service management, with the view of practising medicine in a rural area. On completion, she accepted the role of medical superintendent.