My Account
Wendy Hawkings is best known as the CEO of Northlink Health, a Warkworth-based healthcare company that employs around 1000 people. She talks about tact, travel and her travails to Karyn Scherer.
All I ever wanted to be was a doctor but my parents wouldn’t hear of it. They were scared their “Rosebud” was going to catch something, so I trained as a braille translator instead. I grew up in Castor Bay and my father John Senior was at that time the biggest builder on the Shore. I was very much Daddy’s girl. I’ve got a brother who’s six years older and a younger sister, but I was the spoilt one.
We moved to Point Wells in the early 60s. My parents fell in love with the soil and bought a property right on the waterfront. I married a man who was 20 years older than me and in 1971 we decided to move to Warkworth. Our son Dean was born in 1965 and we adopted another boy and fostered 16 children. When I look at kids today sitting in front of their screens, I just feel sorry for them. We spent our childhood having adventures all day, and the boys and the foster children had pretty much the same upbringing.
In the early 70s we spent two years with the boys travelling around the United States, and down into Mexico and back up to the Mojave Desert where we spent nine months at the Edwards Air Force Base because my husband wanted to do research on alternate energy. When we came back we found that we’d lost virtually everything. The local accountant, Mr Todd, was supposed to be looking after everything but he was embezzling his clients’ money. So I had to really knuckle down and for a while I worked for Social Welfare. Harry Kyle had this idea that there had to be a better way to look after people in their own homes, because in those days you either stayed with family or went to hospital. We were the pilot for NZ and now it has spread throughout the whole country.
Lockwood Smith was a young politician then and he understood my dream and gave me $50 to help me get started. I still regard him as a close friend and one of the highlights of my life was being invited to his lovely wedding at Parliament. Bob Matheson was a GP in Warkworth and he also got behind it. Three mornings a week Bob and I would go out gleaning on the farms. I remember one day he said to me: “God help me. I went to medical school for six years to learn to be a doctor and I end up picking pumpkins to get money for homecare.”
The only brushes I’ve ever had with the law was when the local cop discovered we were selling homemade peach schnapps to raise money. Another time Bob and I stopped the traffic on the highway and made people pay a fine to get past us. And in the early days I was censured for helping to shower a client because you weren’t supposed to touch them then. You were just supposed to do housework. Nowadays staff are highly trained and give injections and everything.
The big year in my life was 1997, when I eloped with my second husband and soulmate, Don Hawkings. He used to own Solway, the big deer farm, and built the Mobil station. He’s 84 now and he’s been in a wheelchair for the last four years with cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. In 1997 I was also awarded a QSM, made a JP, and it was also the year that Don and I and Roger Shaw set up SeniorNet. For the first 10 years that Don and I were married, I would take two months off every year and we would go overseas. We visited 59 countries. Another thing we did was adopt one of those dollar-a-day children through Save the Children Fund. When she was 7 we went to Thailand and met her.
If you came to visit our head office, which had a turnover of well over $18 million this year in wages alone, you would find that nearly everything has been patched or donated. All our money has gone back into the community. When we got left a couple of homes in people’s wills, we sold them and built the homes for the disabled and elderly in Mangawhai. But we could see what was happening in the health sector so we decided to merge with Geneva Healthcare to survive. We were offered over a million dollars more by another company, but the board felt Geneva would look after our staff and clients better.
In 2010 I lost my first breast to cancer and I had a full-on anaphylactic shock on the operating table. I was allergic to the blue dye they use. When I came round I couldn’t talk. I could move a finger and I could blink and that was all. I was on life support and then a week later they deemed me strong enough to go back under because they hadn’t actually taken the boob right off. Six months later I had the other one off and then six months after that another lump came up. I think I’m healthy now. I coped mainly because of help from my daughter-in-law Karen and my PA Trudy Caldwell.
On Anzac Day next year I will have done my six months as CEO of Geneva Northlink and I’ll retire. I want to work with the Warkworth Floral Art Society and join SeniorNet. I became a Jehovah’s Witness in 1965 and I want to spend time on that. I’m also planning to use my new Raleigh ladies push bike a bit more. Both Don and I have little Ducati motorbikes too, so for my retirement present I asked for a towbar for Don’s car so we can put the bikes on the back and go riding.
My greatest pleasure, other than being with Don, is having my two grandsons to stay or going out on Dean’s boat with them. They’re 8 and 11 and I think I get more pleasure out of them than anything I could ever buy. Don and I between us have six boys, and we’ve got 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
My Dad died at 90 and my Mum lived to be 94. I’m 70 now and I feel like a giant out-of-space dinosaur. I’m very assertive by nature and that’s what you need when you’re starting something that’s never been done before. But today in healthcare you need tact and the ability to be politically correct and I’m neither.
Last year for the Queen’s Jubilee, current chairman John Evans and I were awarded the Officer of the NZ Order of Merit. Recently there has been a state of unrest in the health sector so the Northlink board asked me stay on till we could see a clear way forward. Now that I know the business is in good hands I’m ready to smell the roses.
