Big V interview with MHiPS Director, Prof Frank Oberklaid

Published

Thursday, February 12, 2026 - 12:00 PM

Prof Frank Oberklaid was the Foundation Director of the Centre for Community Child Health. He is the Founding Director of Mental Health in Primary Schools (MHiPS), and Co-Group Leader (Policy and Equity) at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

This article was originally published in The Herald Sun.

Four decades after he transformed paediatric care at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Professor Frank Oberklaid says with a smile that he still wants to put it out of business.

“Every time a child is admitted at a hospital, it represents a failure of the healthcare system,” he says. “That was my theme – what went wrong in the community that this child needed to come to the hospital?”

The lifelong mission was inspired during a stint at Harvard University when leading doctors were shifting focus to preventive health in early childhood. After bringing revolutionary reforms back to Australia he earned a reputation as a disrupter, later overhauling child mental health and developmental issues practices at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. The 2023 Senior Victorian of the Year’s latest legacy – a Mental Health in Primary Schools initiative to train teachers to identify problems before they take root – is now being rolled out state-wide.

In this weekend’s Big V Interview, he explains to Matt Johnston why he challenged the ivory tower approach, when parents should trust their “gut”, and why he believes Prime Minister Anthony Albanese must lead from the front on children’s health.

We like to think we've given back

Prof Oberklaid was born in Kazakhstan to Polish refugees, shortly after World War II. His father, Pinchas, had worked almost all his life and was semi-literate, while his mother, Frania, was “very, very bright” but had been blocked from attending high school due to Jewish student quotas. His parents had fled to Russia when the war started, and when they returned to Poland after the war with their young son, they found they had no other family left.

“They’d had enough of Europe, and my mother had a cousin in Australia who arranged visas, so I arrived here as a three-year-old with literally the clothes on my parents’ back,” he says. “And then slowly, slowly, adapted to Australia.

“My parents were always so grateful to this country, for giving them safety. Melbourne, up until recently, when their generation was dying out, had the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors in the world outside Israel.

“Australia saved them. And my generation has gone on to be educated, and become professional, so we like to think we’ve given back a little bit.” The family’s first home was a room and a kitchen at the back of a shop in Johnston St in Fitzroy, amid a polio epidemic. They later moved to Kew. His father owned a small knitting factory and “eked out a living”.

“My mother helped him in the business, and my mother was really very bright; in a different context, she would have gone to university,” he says.

She also wrote about the family experience and instilled a love of language and words in her son, who went on to be school captain at University High School. “School really gave me a sense of myself,” he says. “I did well academically and I was captain of the football team, which I wish I could put on my CV.” After excelling in the humanities and sciences, he agonised over which path to take before pursuing medicine.

“For a Jewish boy of refugee parents, to be a doctor was, you know, the old stereotype,” he says with a smile. “I got into medicine; didn’t enjoy the first few years, because they were just physics and chemistry and biology, and I only started to enjoy it when we started to see patients in fourth year.”

A whole lifetime of living

In fifth year medicine Prof Oberklaid discovered the Royal Children’s Hospital and was “entranced”. “The innocence of children — nature’s on your side if you intervene and save a child’s life or make it OK, there’s a whole lifetime of living they’ve got to do,” he says. During his studies he met wife, Fay, and the couple travelled in Europe and lived in London, before Prof Oberklaid applied for a position at Harvard University.

While waiting to hear back from Boston, trailblazing US paediatrician Bob Haggerty toured Melbourne as a visiting professor. “I was hearing him articulate all the things that were buzzing around in my head, that I couldn’t give voice to,” he says. They spent four and a half years at Harvard, where Fay completed two Masters degrees in psychology, with their two young children, Michael and Jeanette. The experience was “a boost to my self esteem” to mingle with the best and the brightest, but also allowed him to be involved in a new specialty of developmental-behavioural paediatrics — the interface between paediatrics and psychiatry or paediatrics and psychology.

He was involved in the Brookline Early Education Project, where parents enrol their unborn children in schools and early childhood community healthcare was revolutionised. The context for that project was psychologist Burton White’s work called The First Three Years, in which he argued “with much less evidence than we have today that the first three years of life are really important”. That experience had an enormous influence on Prof Oberklaid’s career, and subsequently on child health in Australia.

Disrupting the system

In his tiny office at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Prof Oberklaid surrounds himself with another passion – words. One quote pinned to a noticeboard, just above poet Eduardo Galeano’s ode to human suffering in “The Nobodies”, describes a theory on how radical new ideas should be framed to gain traction. The theory by researchers Tarrow, Snow and Benford, describes a steady transformation where “new values may have to be planted and nurtured”. It’s a fitting description for Prof Oberklaid’s work when he returned to Melbourne in 1980, to start a contentious new RCH department based on ambulatory pediatrics – effectively reaching into the community and schools to keep kids out of hospital, rather than wait for them to present.

“It was very challenging because I’m a reformer, I’m a disrupter. So there was a lot of both passive but also active opposition to what I was trying to do,” he says. “The hospital in those days was just a place where sick kids came, and the community was a place where kids lived.”

“There were quite a few influential people who thought the hospital should remain a tertiary care centre, which should focus on just the sickest kids and all our resources should go on better intensive care and better respirators and whatever. “I was saying, ‘my mission is to put the hospital out of business’.”

Professor Oberklaid when he was director of child health and ambulatory paediatrics at Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne with Justin Bonino. At Harvard, he heard the chair of the Department of Paediatrics speak about community involvement in a way that stayed with him for life. “He said, ‘every time a child is admitted to hospital, it represents a failure of the healthcare system’,” he says. “Wow! How powerful is that?
“So that theme really moulded my career. How can we be working with children and families and GPs and nurses to stop these problems from occurring in the first place, or if they evolved, do something about them very early on?” Part of this was about information sharing with other health services, with Prof Oberklaid arguing that if a GP misdiagnosed a child “that’s our fault”. 

“When you think of all the knowledge, and all the resources available in this institution, the Murdoch and the Children’s and the University of Melbourne; not to share that with the community is a crime,” he says. “Just to sit here in an ivory tower, drinking coffee, waiting for kids to arrive.”

He also backed parents to trust their instincts, culminating in his book, Your Child’s Health. “Mothers and fathers, in your gut feeling, you sort of know what’s right,” he says. “Don’t be ashamed of getting help early.” An ongoing bid to boost preventional intervention remains the goal, even if getting the message through to politicians is difficult. “You can’t take a politician to a school and show them prevention,” he says. “But if you look at many of the problems we face in adult life now – obesity, heart disease, homelessness, unemployment, welfare dependencies, substance abuse, family violence – the pathways to many of those problems begin in those early years.” 

The elephant in the room

Many public presentations Prof Oberklaid gives will include a slide with an image of an elephant.

“Child mental health is the elephant in the room,” he says. “It was ignored for a long, long time. Then it was crowded out by adult mental health. And then as adolescent mental health became more prominent — which is good — that took over most of the space.”

One of Prof Oberklaid’s proudest achievements was to co-chair a national mental health strategy – a road map for reform that he said needs political leadership to enact – as well as to establish a Mental Health in Primary Schools initiative that began in Victoria.

The MHiPS introduces to schools a mental health leader who trains teachers to be on the lookout for mental health issues in young children before they take hold or manifest. A pilot began shortly before Covid-19 broke out. “Two things happened during Covid. People started to appreciate how important teachers were and, secondly, they started to be concerned about child mental health,” he says.

“Teachers observe these kids at school in the playground, in the classroom, interacting with their peers. So there is an opportunity for them to pick up problems that are very early stage, and intervene to prevent them becoming established and more serious.” Importantly, the mental health leaders are not seen as clinicians who treat children, and have non-teaching roles that are “protected time”.

“Their role is to train classroom teachers and to be a resource within the school to build a whole of school capacity around resilience, and to be a liaison between the school and community,” he said.

A partnership with the University of Melbourne’s education faculty provided a “fantastic training course”, and Education Minister James Merlino – who was mental health minister and deputy premier at the time – delivered funding to broaden its reach.

“He (Merlino) said, ‘this has to be in every single school in Victoria’,” he says, “By the end of next year, we’ll have trained almost 2000 schools.” Two pilots have begun in Queensland, through philanthropic funding, and the “ambition” is for a national rollout – based on clear results showing the initiative is reducing stigma, making teachers more confident in dealing with mental health issues, and leading to improved conversations with parents about their children’s wellbeing.

Ever the vocal advocate, Prof Oberklaid says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should lead from the front and promote an increased and sustained investment in the health and wellbeing of children – “the best economic investment that a country can make”.

“When I was younger I thought to change the world all I had to do was good research, get it published in good journals, people would read it, the light bulb would go on, the world would change,” he says. “So I did good research, published in good journals, and three people read it, and nothing changed.

“I realised that doing good research wasn’t enough, that I really have to get interested in the impact that research had on the community.

“Especially now with social media … people are so vulnerable.”

This article was originally published in The Herald Sun.