Jo Lee

Jo trained and worked as a nurse, across the UK, Israel and Africa, before returning to New Zealand and joining RCP as a PA to its Auckland City Hospital team. From there she taught herself the disciplines around her and moved into coordination and then delivery, and more than twenty years on she has built a long and varied career in project delivery with RCP.

That background gives her an easy fluency between clinicians, contractors and consultants, and a knack for turning the technical into plain terms. "I taught myself to understand the various consultant disciplines and interpret information so I could explain it in layman's terms to clients." She specialises in the hardest kind of hospital project, the refurbishments and theatre upgrades delivered while the wards around them keep running.

She has worked across major health programmes, including a long stretch on the Counties Manukau health estate, and has carried those skills beyond health onto projects as prominent as Commercial Bay.

More recently she has led the Parihaka Infrastructure Project, a $19 million renewal of three-waters, power, fibre and roading across 22 hectares of Māori reservation land in Taranaki. It is work with real cultural, archaeological and environmental weight, and she helped shape a procurement approach aligned with the tikanga of Parihaka that saw more than 70% of the work go to Māori-owned enterprises.