Our Story
Why “Persist”?
The name has a history.
In 2017, a United States Senator was silenced mid-speech as she read aloud a letter that was critical of the Senate Majority leader. Her colleagues invoked a provision to silence her. The official record noted that she had been warned, she had been given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. The phrase was meant as a rebuke. It became a rallying call — reclaimed by women who recognised, in those three words, something they had lived themselves.
But persistence, for Jillann, is not a political statement. It is a practice. One learned long before that Senate chamber, and tested repeatedly since.
It began in sport. In Kyokushin karate, persisting to earn a 2nd Dan black belt despite two devastating knee injuries, where “Osu no Seishin” (to push oneself to the limits of endurance under pressure of any kind) became part of her DNA.
That discipline — the capacity to absorb difficulty and continue — became the foundation of a career defined by taking on things that weren’t working and refusing to accept that they couldn’t be fixed.
At the United Nations, leading health services for 100,000 deployed peacekeeping personnel across some of the world’s most dangerous environments, the barriers were always real and always numerous. When her team would lay them out — the political constraints, the resource limits, the institutional resistance — Jillann’s response was consistent: “And in spite of all that, we will still succeed.” They usually did, ultimately implementing the largest strategic reform in the history of the Medical Services Division.
Back in Australia, her return to Queensland Health as Deputy Director-General happened just as the world closed down. Australia sealed its borders, Queensland Health moved into full Covid emergency mode, and the role Jillann had returned to lead became almost unrecognisable within weeks. It was not the chapter anyone had planned.
What that period clarified, if nothing else, was that persistence actually requires not just the capacity to push forward, but the willingness to keep advocating for what is right even when the room goes quiet.
“Nevertheless, she persisted.”
And persistence, it turns out, is not a single act. It is a direction of travel.
Jillann returned to the clinical frontlines at the height of the pandemic — to community practice and then emergency departments, to patients, to the work that had started everything. From there, she earned her Rural Generalist Fellowship, was appointed to lead A Better Culture — a national project to address the findings of the Medical Training Survey and reshape the culture of medicine in Australia — and took her place on the ACRRM Board. Each step chosen deliberately. Each one a continuation of the same conviction: that the health system is capable of being better, that culture is not fixed, and that the people willing to say so out loud — and keep saying so — are exactly the people it needs.
The work continues.