Nick Steele on being Chief Executive, caring for loved ones, and crunching numbers in the NHS

Nick Steele, Chief Executive of Metro North Health.

Nick Steele has been a familiar face at Metro North over the past few months, acting as Chief Executive since September 2025 before being formally appointed to the role this week.

The English-born, leader and self-proclaimed Oasis superfan who cut his teeth in the NHS as an accountant brings with him more than just a penchant for numbers – but a deeply personal patient-centred perspective that shapes every decision he makes.

Nick says he’s always been competitive, having achieved the status of Chief Financial Officer in his early 30s. He then set his sight on becoming a Chief Executive of a health service.

In 2022, Nick’s late wife was battling cancer, and without question he stood back from the chance to pursue this goal to care for her.

It’s this experience that makes him the Chief Executive he is today, with the patient experience integral to the plans he is making for Metro North’s future.

“I’ve always wanted a CE role, and I wanted to apply for one four to five years ago but put it on hold to care for my wife when she had cancer, taking a break from work in 2022 to look after her and explore different treatment options,” he said.

“It’s this experience that’s made me even more aware that I want to stop doing things that aren’t adding value for our patients and look at innovative ways we can improve the outcomes we get for them.

“On Christmas Eve, I also lost my Mum who was unwell, and being able to tell her I was successful in the Chief Executive role before she passed away was very special – she could not stop smiling.”

Nick says his experiences with losing loved ones to ill health and his interactions with health services during this time has shaped not only his compassion and commitment to patient-improvement and clinician engagement, but how he approaches work.

He says that work-life balance is a key priority to address for the 30,000 staff employed at Metro North.

Improving culture, tackling occupational violence, delivering performance improvement via the sustainability plan, going completely digital, rapidly expanding out of hospital care, focussing on improving the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and taking forward Metro North’s components of the Hospital Rescue Plan also top the list of his immediate priorities in the job.

Setting substantial goals and being transparent about them seems to come naturally to Nick, who is hungry for this next challenge.

“I’m ambitious and have been from early in my career, and I want to drive change and, with the support of clinicians, make changes that will improve the care that we provide every day,” he said.

“I don’t know everything, and I want to listen to those around me, to get the staff’s views on better ways we can do things in order to build a longer-term strategic plan.”

Outside of work, Nick sets himself a personal agenda to try all Brisbane’s best restaurants, enjoy live music any chance he can get, and indulge in a great glass of red.

We spoke to Nick about everything from what drives him to what band he is seeing next – join us as we get to know him:

Show transcript

So thanks for joining us today, Nick. We’re going to have a little bit of chat. We’re going to chat about who you are and what you’re going to bring to this role as our new CEO. Finding out you got the role and what that meant to you after acting in it for a while.

Look, I’ve always wanted a CE role. And I probably wanted to apply for one about 4 or 5 years ago. Well, that was around the time when my wife got sick. Yeah. So I took three months carer’s leave, and tried to look after her the best I could and explore different treatments.

I’ve worked really closely with Metro North on off for over 15 years now, in different roles. I’ve got a lot of respect for the clinicians and the staff. It’s got a special feel about it, Metro North. It’s quite intoxicating. It sort of draws you in, and you actually want to be part of the journey and improve things.

Having been on that patient carer side of things., how do you think that shapes how you’re going to approach a role like a CE?

Look, I think, trying to understand the things that are important to patients. I think it’s re-emphasized that. So what I’m really keen to do is stop doing things that aren’t really adding value for patients.

In terms of what you’re competitive about, now in this role, what a kind of your key focus areas that you really want to work on for Metro North?

Yeah, oh look in in general, that competitiveness for Metro North is a real desire to improve patient care. And so actually, I saw something the other day about aspiring to be the best hospital and health network in the southern hemisphere. I can get behind that!

Looking at the culture, how we engage staff. How they are involved in decision making and feeling able to put ideas forward. I’ve met a number of people over the last four months who’ve told me they’ve been scared to put ideas forward, for fear of retribution and that should never happen, because staff on the frontline will know better than me.

We’ve got to implement our sustainability plan and really drive improved timeliness of care. And I think we’ve made great inroads. We have started to turn. We’ve seen our elective surgery long waits coming down, our elective surgery waiting list come down. We’re starting to tackle our gastro waiting list as well. So we are starting to make improvements.

I think we’ve got to reform our out of hospital care, and we’ve got to fully digitise Metro North. So ieMR will be fully rolled out across Metro North, in the near future which is really exciting.

We’ve got to look to redesign our patient flow.

So I want to improve the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids. I actually think that’s how we can get generational change, as if we focus on the kids and the environments they’re in.

Hospital rescue plan.. Prince Charles, Redcliffe, and really looking about how we can get maximum benefit from Queensland Cancer Centre. I think it’s going to be a really important thing as well.

So there are a whole plethora of opportunities, but it’s doing it in a way that is planned and staff feel engaged with.

And you also talked about wanting to improve that culture piece in terms of work life balance, particularly for some of our operational clinical staff that struggle with that. What’s your thinking there, or are you still collecting your thoughts?

Still collecting them. So we’re doing a specific piece of work to try and develop a range of initiatives to improve our culture, across Metro North. We’ve got a couple of staff off line at the moment working on that. We’ve done some surveys, we’re doing some focus groups. We’re just starting to collate some of the findings from that. But what we’re going to go back out with now is actually engaging frontline staff. What would we do to address that? And I think sort of work life balance is one. Trust, openness, transparency, engagement, communication are all going to be other things as well.

What do you like to do for fun when you’re not at work? When you’re not being CEO?

Yeah. Look, I’m not great at it. I think having had the experiences I’ve had with my wife passing away three and a half years ago, it does put things into perspective. So, I do try and get out. I enjoy going out for dinner. I enjoy a nice bottle of red wine and a bottle of champagne. I like to play golf and just starting to get back into golf. I do the gym three, four times a week. Really like music. The band’s I most listen to a Coldplay and Oasis, and I dragged my new wife down to watch Oasis in Melbourne.

Sounds amazing, thanks Nick.

Nick Steele on being Chief Executive, caring for loved ones, and crunching numbers in the NHS

Nick Steele has been a familiar face at Metro North over the past few months, acting as Chief Executive since September 2025 before being formally appointed to the role this week.

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