Juliette McAleer is an Australian patient advocate and former public sector leader with experience across disability, child safety, youth justice, and community corrections.
Drawing upon both lived experience and systems expertise, her work focuses on human-centered healthcare design, restorative approaches in healthcare, and the role of Narrative-Based Medicine in strengthening relationships between patients and healthcare professionals.
Juliette recently completed the NBM Lab’s Foundational Certificate, where she explored how narrative practices can deepen reflection and partnership in healthcare. Her writing is committed to ensuring that patients’ experiences integrated into healthcare systems and medical education.
Juliette published a two-part essay with Restorative Practices International that explores what happens in the wake of healthcare harm, not only at the point of clinical error, but in the responses that follow, focusing on how these are influenced by institutional processes, communication, and the presence or absence of relational care.
The first part brings together reflective writing and a poem to capture aspects of the aftermath that are difficult to reduce to clinical or procedural language. It focuses on the ongoing nature of these experiences, including uncertainty, disruption, and the current limits of existing systems in making sense of what has occurred.
The second part takes a more analytical approach, introducing the concept of institutional courage in healthcare. It examines how systems respond to harm, and where current approaches (particularly legal and procedural frameworks) can fall short of what is needed in order to truly help people heal after harm.
Together, the two parts were written as a way of thinking through these questions more carefully, drawing on both lived experience and a broader interest in how healthcare systems engage with those affected by adverse events.
As a health consumer representative on the Advisory Board for the newly opened School of Medicine at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Juliette is also shaping the future of medical education in Australia by embedding Narrative-Based Medicine throughout the new curriculum for MD students.
QUT supported this vision by funding her participation in the Foundational Certificate, and she is now working alongside Dr. Mia Harris, a lecturer in medical education at QUT and fellow program participant, to help integrate these approaches into the education of future physicians.