Inside the Occupational Health Leadership Dinner & Forum

Nic Fannelli

In early May 2026, Pemba Capital Partners hosted an Occupational Health Dinner & Forum, bringing together founders and executives from across the ecosystem. The night featured a high-calibre panel of industry veterans - Steve Harvey, Jane Bourke, and James Thiedeman - providing highly engaging insights, analysis and of course, war stories from their combined decades of experience.

From the outset, it was clear that the contemporary challenges and opportunities facing the sector today are not entirely new but have appeared before in different forms. Psychosocial risk is one such example, being directly front of mind for directors and business leaders for the last decade. However, it is only in recent years that it has gained further prominence in popular conversation, largely driven by changing social attitudes and dramatic increases in the cost of serious injuries. A NSW Workers Compensation Parliamentary Inquiry stated the median serious psychological injury claim has risen from $146,000 in 2019-20 to $288,000 just 5 years later. While this challenge for business is accelerating and the need for supporting services is greater, we heard words of caution from our panel: the need for providers to have real capability and experience matters more than ever in this domain. Occupational health providers who take a considered and patient approach towards investing or acquiring this capability may be best positioned to take advantage of this growth opportunity.

One of the more substantive themes from the discussion centred on leadership and team management throughout the growth journey. In any healthcare business, there is an underlying tension between commercial decisions and clinical teams. This challenge is not new; but becomes more critical to get right as the business grows. Hearing from our panel on this tension, what became clear was the need for commercial leaders to bring clinical staff into decisions and along for the journey. While 'walking the walk' and being close to the front line of service delivery is a prerequisite for any commercial leader, it goes much further than just earning the respect of staff. Commercial leaders' decisions benefit from proximity to any operational bottleneck, enabling faster and more informed decision making.

For founder-clinicians, there are different challenges, primarily related to bandwidth; a common one we hear is founders continuing to provide customer services, alongside executing on business development, payroll, rostering and technology. Our panel emphasised that this aspect of business evolution is most critical to growth, but can look very different for every founder. Some clinician-founders wish to bring on commercial leaders to support operations and enable more time to be focused on delivering services to patients; other founders wish to focus more on business development and empower the next generation of clinicians under them. However this transition looks, the underlying theme we heard from the panel was the same; empower your people to make independent decisions and own them.

Underpinning all of the conversations we had was the role technology and AI can play within occupational health. What became clear is that technology and AI are only as good as the underlying data. Many occupational health businesses are holding decades of patient records, treatment plans and outcomes; but the data sits across disparate systems. Providers that are able to unlock this data and use it to power decision making have the opportunity to focus more on patients, sharpen their customer value proposition with predictive analytics and deliver risk assessments at scale.

I walked away from the discussion energised by the exciting opportunities available across the occupational health ecosystem. The sector is benefiting from strong thematic growth drivers that will benefit agile founders and high-quality operators able to get the best out of their team and fully leverage technology.

At Pemba, we remain highly engaged with founders and management teams across the occupational health sector, and we look forward to continuing these conversations.