Meet The Team

At Dempster Consulting we have a depth of global and national expert collaborators as part of the team. Our team has a history of matching the right expertise to projects and bringing our best together for the ultimate benefit of clients.

Managing Director

Andrew Dempster

Andrew is an expert advisor with a mix of professional advisory and clinical leadership expertise few can parallel.

His most recent experience, prior to founding Dempster Consulting, included establishing and directing Australia’s leading mental health advisory business at a global Big 4 consulting firm. Prior to his 20 year career in professional advisory services Andrew worked across the spectrum of mental health clinical services, including senior leadership roles for over a decade.

He has advised a number of senior leaders, bureaucrats and CEOs at National, State/Territory and local levels. He has a depth of understanding and knowledge in Health, Alcohol and other Drug Services, Suicide Prevention, Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing and Leadership and Team Development.

He's a collaborative and passionate leader, who prides himself on building capability, promoting critical self-reflection and developing individuals and organisations. He thinks deeply about complex and challenging issues, developing novel solutions centred on client outcomes with real world impact.

Some of his roles have included work with:

World Economic Forum and European Commission, Research and Symposium on Global Health Misalignments - Leading the Australian arm of the research and facilitating global healthcare executive breakout sessions in Luxembourg
Balit Durn Durn, Centre of Excellence for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional wellbeing – co-developing Strategic Plan
Mentoring, coaching and performance managing over 25 healthcare leaders who continue to shape the sector today in senior leadership and executive roles (including CEO, Board and Deputy Secretary roles)
Royal Commission into Mental Health in Victoria –facilitation lead for community forums

His capabilities include:

The ability to hold teams, groups and forums through complex, challenging and emotive issues
A deeply reflective approach to understanding opportunities and issues in organisations
A nuanced and culturally safe approach when working with diverse communities including extensive experience working with different Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities and organisations, LGBTQIA+ and diverse communities

Qualifications

Bachelor of Commerce, Deakin University
Bachelor of Psychology, Deakin University
Graduate Cert Psychiatric Nursing, RMIT
Bachelor of Nursing, RMIT
Six Sigma, SAI Global
Lean foundations, Cardiff University

Leading Psychological Safety Expert

Professor Brock Bastian

Brock Bastian is currently a Professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, and Director of Psychological Safety Australia.

As an award-winning researcher he has strong interest in understanding the various social and culture factors that impact decision-making and wellbeing. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed journal articles, and his work has been featured in outlets such as The Economist, The New Yorker, TIME, Forbes, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review. Brock has held significant leadership positions, including President of the Society for Australasian Social Psychologists, Director of the Ethics & Wellbeing Research Hub, comprising 10 academic staff, 5 postdoctoral researchers, and over 20 PhD students, and a Dame Kate Campbell Fellowship, placing him in the top 1% of researchers at the University of Melbourne.

He is the author of “THE OTHER SIDE OF HAPPINESS: Embracing a more fearless approach to living” and consults across industry and government translating scientific knowledge into practical insights and strategies. Brock has collaborated with Andrew on expert panels for developing leadership and mental health in the workplace.

Brock brings scientific insights on culture, communication, wellbeing, and behavioural ethics to address a range of organisational challenges. From speaking to senior leaders of large organisations to providing accessible workshops for front-line staff, he has a unique capacity to communicate scientific knowledge in a practical and accessible manner.

Whether it is building more psychologically safe teams, providing best practice advice on managing stress and mental health, or providing expert advice on managing problematic workplace behaviour, as a social psychologist he has a strong focus on early intervention and prevention. Brock is a TEDx speaker and has provided keynotes at many of the top universities in the world (e.g., Oxford, Princeton), for some of the largest organisations in Australia (e.g., Microsoft, Deloitte) and for peak body conferences (e.g., Workplace Wellness Festival, Dive In Festival, HR + L&D Innovation & Tech Fest AU).

Working across all levels of large organisations, from boards of directors and the c-suite to mid-level management and front of line staff, he applies his expertise to building leadership strengths, developing communication capabilities, uplifting culture, and increasing organisational capacity. Often his expertise is drawn on in response to poor ethical decision-making or problematic workplace behaviour, to manage psychosocial risk, and to promote mental health.

Find out more about Brock at Psychological Safety Australia

Leadership Expert

Kathy Hilyard

Born in Canberra, Kathy is an associate and collaborator with Dempster Consulting. She is also the Co-founder of the Centre for Collective Leadership, a for purpose organisation established in 2023 to pioneer deeper work and thinking on leadership, culture and strategy for complex settings.

Kathy’s first career commenced in the Australian Public Service in Community Services and Health portfolios. Her consulting and advisory career has included fifteen years at her own boutique consulting firm and later as a national leader and partner in a big 4 consulting firm where she first met Andrew.

Specialising in working with public sector, health and community sector clients, Kathy has over 30 years experience in facilitation, design and development of stakeholder engagement and collaboration processes. She is known for her engaging approach and skilled facilitation, her strategic advisory abilities and for her collaboration work with executive leadership teams. She has authored many publications on topics of high performance, leadership in times of uncertainty, leading collaboration and sector reform.

Kathy is a creative, empathetic and purpose driven leader, facilitator and thinker. You can find more about Kathy at the Centre for Collective Leadership

Global Youth Mental Health Leader

Professor Patrick McGorry

Professor Patrick McGorry is an Irish-born, Australian psychiatrist known world-wide for his development and scaling up of early intervention, youth mental health services, mental health innovation, advocacy and reform. He is executive director of Orygen, Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, and founding editor of the journal “Early Intervention in Psychiatry”.

2005 he led the advocacy resulting in the establishment of the National Youth Mental Health Foundation, which later became Headspace, of which he is a founding board member
2010 he was selected as Australian of the Year and became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO)
2013 he received the Annual Research Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Washington DC
2015 was awarded the Lieber Prize for Schizophrenia Research by the US-based Brain and Behaviour Foundation
2016 he became the first psychiatrist to be elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science
2018 he received the Schizophrenia International Research Society Lifetime Achievement Award
2019 he received the Humanitarian Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry and the NHMRC Research Excellence Award
2019-2020 he was Chair of the Expert Advisory Committee to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System

Pat has published 1550 publications, with 63,572 citations and played key advocacy and advisory roles to government on health system reform in Australia and many parts of the world.

He is Immediate Past President of the International Association for Youth Mental Health, Past President of the Schizophrenia International Research Society, Past President of the Society for Mental Health Research, and was Founding President and is now Treasurer of the IEPA: Early Intervention in Mental Health. He is also a Founding Director of Australians for Mental Health.

He is passionate about Young People’s mental health and the critical challenges the next generations are facing and has worked to develop models of care and services that are tailored to this need and built on the latest evidence.

It was in the development of a large scale regional service model that he first worked with Andrew. A connection that has continued through ongoing collaboration over the years – with a joint focus on improving the accessibility, quality and safety of mental health services for young people and their friends and families.

Data, Analytics and Insights Expert

Kim Hawthorne

Kim brings extensive experience in program evaluation, reviews, data science, statistics, survey design and data collection over many years working in Commonwealth government, state government and through his work in professional services firms. Individually, or in leading teams of analysts, Kim brings the ability to use the methodologies to draw out the quantitative insights that leadership teams need. These insights provide confidence that these teams are setting the right direction for their organisation, programs or projects.

His experience covers the full range of health and human service datasets - demographic, primary health, insurance, pharmaceutical, aged care, disability, education and the full suite of hospital datasets. This includes the experience in integrating and visualising seemingly disparate datasets. And the ability to design data collection tools to gather new insights beyond what is captured administratively.

Examples of the impact of Kim's analyses include uplifts in funding for homelessness service providers (over $90m), the expansion of programs from pilot sites to national rollouts (from 14 to over 50), using linked data to improve the targeting of care coordination programs and cost-benefit analyses to understand the financial impact and ongoing funding of a program in remote Aboriginal communities. Many of Kim's analyses sit within publicly available reports.

Kim has worked with Andrew on multiple complex evaluation programs. These have included a focus on improving housing support for people living with a mental illness, the transition of acute care in hospital to community settings and modelling demand and service plans for health services.