Kirsten is a congenital cardiac surgeon with a long experience in paediatric and adult congenital cardiac surgery. She served as the Senior Clinical Director of the Paediatric and Adult Congenital Cardiac Surgery Service at Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand for over 20 years. For more than two decades, Kirsten has been leading a team that operates on the hearts of the country’s youngest and most vulnerable patients. She is a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to health and paediatric heart surgery. Her early experiences working at Starship sparked a desire to improve access to cardiac surgery for children in the Pacific. She promotes valve repair as opposed to replacement for rheumatic valve disease in children, to improve the outcomes of neonates with critical congenital heart lesions and to develop surgical strategies for the young adult growing up with congenital heart disease. She helped establish the Hearts 4 Kids Trust in 2015, which provides funds for repairs of simple congenital heart defects in Fijian babies and children. She has undertaken many trips to perform surgery in Fiji for free and will be going again in July of this year. Kirsten formally retired in March 2024 but has done a few locums back at Starship. During her retirement, she has decided to live up to her childhood dream of being a farmer, planting and maintaining native trees in Central Otago to help with the conservation of native plants.
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