If you asked Tara MacAdams what one problem in the world she'd wish away if she had the power, she wouldn't hesitate: "Eradicate hepatitis C by 2030, and racism" (yes, she knows that's two things). That combination of principled, warm, and a little cheeky turns out to be exactly what you want in a nurse working at the frontline of hepatitis C care.
Tara is a Clinical Nurse at the Northern Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia (DASSA), and this June she'll mark a decade in the role. Tara came to Australia from New Zealand, where she had been working as a mental health nurse with children and adolescents. An eight-week contract at DASSA landed in her lap, and eight weeks became full-time, full-time became ten years. When asked what has kept her at DASSA, her answer is simple: working with good people and helping clients.
It's a sentiment Michael Brown, Site Coordinator for DASSA, clearly shares. Michael nominated Tara for this recognition, noting that she has been a "steady, consistent presence" in providing POCT to at-risk clients at the DASSA clinic and the Needle Syringe Program. Beyond her clinical work, she's the person the team can count on for the unglamorous but essential business of data and stock management, never too busy to help when it's needed. That kind of quiet reliability is easy to overlook and hard to replace.
Under Tara's lead, and alongside colleagues Inderjit and Bianca, the Northern DASSA site has now delivered more POCT tests than any of the four DASSA sites across South Australia. It's a remarkable achievement for a small team, and a testament to what consistent, committed care looks like in practice.
Inderjit has been part of the team since 2022, bringing years of experience from the Gastroenterology ward at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Her hero is Guru Gobind Singh, a figure she describes as representing courage, sacrifice, faith and justice. Those values are clear in the way she approaches her work. For a nurse who spent years watching what hepatitis C does to a body, her take on what getting tested can mean for patients is four words long: "Healthy liver, healthy life." Tara builds on what a healthy life means to people: a new lease on life, being able to be present for their kids and grandkids, and being able to travel. These are people reclaiming futures they weren't sure were available to them.
That's the power of same-day testing. A finger prick, a GeneXpert machine, and roughly an hour later, a result, and a treatment pathway that doesn't require a follow-up appointment that may never happen. For the population DASSA serves, that speed isn't a convenience. It's often the difference between someone accessing care and someone falling through the cracks.
Both nurses are candid about the learning curve, and their advice is worth paying attention to for any team starting out or scaling up. First, Inderjit's: build a solid grounding in HCV itself before you touch the machine. Understanding the disease, she suggests, is what gives the testing its meaning. Then Tara's: move from training to testing as quickly as possible, and then keep going. The more you do it, the easier it gets; the finger prick technique, the rhythms of the GeneXpert, the flow of a same-day result conversation. These things take repetition to become second nature, and that confidence is something training alone can't fully deliver. Don't let the skills fade before you've had the chance to bed them in.
Day to day, this is a team that runs on stories, jokes, and — by their own admission — lollies and chocolate. In a setting that involves a lot of finger pricks, having something sweet on hand turns out to be both practical and quietly good for morale. Inderjit describes DASSA as a second home, and the team as one that looks after each other. That culture of mutual support is foundational to the quality of care they provide.
Tara's own heroes are her parents, whose cultural traditions and values continue to shape who she is. Her colleagues describe her as easy to approach and always willing to help — and in a field where stigma so often keeps people from seeking care, those qualities are not incidental. They are clinical tools.
At Northern DASSA, Tara MacAdams, Inderjit, and Bianca are doing the quiet, consistent, record-breaking work that the best healthcare so often looks like — one finger prick, one result, one new lease on life at a time.