Ahead of the curve with a wealth of experience

IN AN era where staying more than five years in one job is rare, St Andrew’s Toowoomba Hospital stands a cut above with a combined 130 years of experience in their maintenance team alone.

Kenn Zerner, Geoff Voll, Frank Shackell, and Aaron ‘Arty’ Schauble have seen the growth of the hospital over the decades and are proud of what it’s become.

“I started here as a gardener originally because it was only a very small hospital,” Kenn said, who has been at St Andrew’s for 40 years in June.

“There’s a picture [in the foyer] of what the hospital was like when I started, and it was only 40 beds – now we’re 155,” he said.

“When I started here, they were building a sunroom onto what is now West Wing.

“Then we went on and built the staircase that went downstairs, then we built an extension onto the central ward in ’83 before starting all the really big projects in ’88.”

Kenn started as a gardener at the hospital before moving onto maintenance jobs.

“I came in one day, and there was the CEO at the time fixing a pump – I said ‘what the heck are you doing that for?’, so it started off with that,” he explained.

From there, he built up a team to handle the maintenance around the hospital – from engineering and electrical to building, gardening and more – ranging up to nine members over the years and now four.

Frank started with boilers over at St Vincent’s in December 1979 before moving over to St Andrew’s 13 years ago, while Geoff joined the hospital family in 1992.

“Without Geoffrey, we’d be lost,” Frank said.

“He has his finger on the pulse of the entirety of Toowoomba – if you want to know where something is, you ask Geoffrey,” he said.

Meanwhile, Arty has been with the team for 17 years – first as a contractor to assist with all the building, and now as a permanent fixture of the group.

As the veteran of the group, Kenn has been the one to see the most change over the years.

“When I first started here, a knee operation took two weeks recovery in the hospital, now it’s only a day or two,” he said.

He also loves how St Andrew’s looks after its own.

“In that time, the hospital put me through university, they gave me a mechanical degree and then the first degree in the world for maintenance engineering.”

This keeping ahead of the curve is one thing that makes St Andrew’s so special.

“I don’t think Toowoomba people realise that between the two hospitals we’ve always been pretty world-leading – the radiotherapy system [ICON] was a world-leader, the robots we use now were all world leaders,” Kenn said.

“It’s progressed really quickly and I think it’ll keep going.”