Rachel McLeod is a registered nurse with almost 20 years of experience, a Yugatapol woman from the Yagra Nation and one of the most sought-after locum nurses in the cmr community. Her clients don’t just want her to stay longer. They say things like: “Rachel is everything.”

In this episode of It Takes Heart, Nurse Rachel shares what that means and why healing goes far deeper than clinical care.

Everybody Has a Story

Rachel’s approach to nursing starts before she asks a single clinical question. She sits down, she listens and she lets the conversation find its own way.

It sounds simple. In practice, it requires a kind of patience that not every system rewards. But Rachel has seen what happens when nurses take that time. Patients open up, context emerges and the full picture comes into view and with it, a better path to care.

This philosophy runs through everything she does, whether she is working in emergency, acute, or aged care at a multi-purpose service (MPS) site in rural Australia.

Growing Up on Country

Rachel was born in Ipswich and raised on a cattle station called The Hollow, near Beaudesert in South East Queensland. There was no running water, no modern comforts, just family, country and a way of living that most Australians have never experienced.

These early years shaped how Rachel sees the world and how she sees her patients.

A Dream That Set a Calling

Rachel came to nursing through faith and a literal dream. Her youngest son had just started kindy. Her husband worked away on a uranium mine. She knew she needed to do something, but it had to mean something.

She dreamed of placing her hands on a man who had fallen and seeing light come from her palms. She knew this was a sign so when she woke up, she enrolled into nursing school. She studied externally through the University of South Australia’s Whyalla campus while her children were at school, completing her degree while managing three kids and a husband who worked a week on, week off rotation.

Rachel graduated in November 2005. Four days before she was due to start her first contract as a registered nurse, her husband died on the mine site.

Grief and How It Changed Her Nursing

Rachel has never spoken about her early nursing years without acknowledging what she carried into them. Loss reshaped her relationship with patience and with patients.