Dr Benjamin Chen has been one lucky fellow.

Receiving his FAFRM in 2007, he started in Gold Coast Health as a staff specialist in rehabilitation at the time of unprecedented (and continuing) growth and service demands.

Being somewhat accommodating in nature, he has both unwittingly and deliberately been implicated in various attempts to make the system better, some more successful than others. These included the commissioning and decommissioning of a stand-alone rehabilitation and interim care facility (Carrara Health Centre), involvement in Community as well as Residential Transition Care Program, establishment of Falls and Balance as well as Cognitive Disorders Clinics, participation in various administrative and professional committees (and finding himself useful in some, and not-so-much in others).

His more recent forays into service re-design included setting up Rehabilitation Response Team, an acute in-reach rehabilitation program in 2016, which allowed the number of inpatient rehabilitation beds to be reduced from 83 to 52 in Gold Coast Health. Complex Management Unit (CMU) is a new model of care adopted by Gold Coast Health in 2021 to address the challenge of long-stay patients in inpatient wards, adapting the tried-and-true rehabilitation model of care to a completely different cohort.

It must be stressed that Ben could have done none of the above by himself. Aside from the Providential being in the right place at the right time (the jury is still out on if he had been the right person), he has had the fortune of having a string of supportive bosses, collegiate and forgiving colleagues, a longsuffering wife, well-behaving children, and most important of all, trusting patients and their families, to all of whom he owes a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid in full.