By Taylah Eastwell
Peter Gurr was awarded an Order of Australia medal on January 26 for outstanding service to the community and palliative care organisations.
Mr Gurr is a Vietnam veteran. He has been a member of the Eastern Palliative Care Committee of Management for over 20 years and is also a President of the Outer East Palliative Care Service, having held the top role for over 25 years.
According to Mr Gurr, seeing the growth of these organisations to become “one of the best in the East” is his biggest motivator.
“I think we are a very successful organisation in the East. I’d even boast to say the best in Victoria, we are a very proficient organisation with a great deal of people on the committee of management. My satisfaction is that I’ve been part of it for 25 years,” Mr Thomas Gurr said.
Mr Gurr said one of his career highlights was working to develop the PalCare system, which allows specialist palliative care services to access patient information and documentation in real time. The system improves the co-ordination of care across physical, psychological, spiritual and social domains and allows for ease in caring and monitoring patients.
“That has been an absolutely wonderful thing and we have managed to pass that on to virtually every palliative care service around, that was one of our outstanding achievements,” Mr Gurr said.
Mr Gurr also served as councillor on Maroondah City Counci from 1997-2009 and as mayor for three terms during that period.
“We were a part of the environmental movement that looked to make sure our fauna and that sort of thing was protected. We had a lot of overlays implemented over the years so people could not just develop anywhere or on anything. Now I think Maroondah is one of the best areas because of that,” he said.
He was chairman and trustee at The Foothills Foundation and Charitable Trust between 2011 and 2017 and served on the board at the Dandenong Public Hospital.
One community service that Mr Gurr is particularly proud of is his work with Arrabri Community House in Boronia, where he is a former president and member of the management committee.
“I’ve been there since 1997 and we’ve made it one of the most successful community houses in Maroondah. People can come and do almost anything they wish, a great team of staff and management have built up the classes and things like that over the years so we’ve got a lot of things we do that benefit the community,” he said.
Mr Gurr said he does all his community work “without really thinking much of it”.
“I’ve been involved in the community for such a long time that you tend to do it without really thinking because you enjoy what you do. I love my volunteer status because I can work with people,” he said.
