Meet Simone - Partner, Financial Advisory

Meet Simone Cheung, one of the Partners in our Deloitte Access Economics team.

How did your passion for healthcare start and what was the motivation for pursuing a career in healthcare? 

I come from a lower socioeconomic background and always wanted to work in an area that directly "helped" other people and had an equity angle - social and economic equity. Healthcare and human services seemed like the natural sector!

What motivated you to pursue this specialisation over other fields within the healthcare industry?

My parents wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer so I chose to study law and economics as I enjoyed economics a lot at school. I also have a data background and so when I started working in economic consulting in health and human services, I felt like I had found my calling!

Could you provide a brief overview of your professional journey leading up to your current role?

After trialling a few different paths, I started as a Research Assistant at Access Economics. We joined Deloitte in 2011 and I spent a year working in Tonga at the Tongan Bureau of Statistics. When I returned, I started working with the Partner in Sydney at the time (Mike Kissane) who took time to understand my purpose and passions and put me in opportunities that aligned with this. He is the best mentor and has been my sponsor including into the partnership – thanks Mike!

What skills and capabilities do you bring to transform health?

The ability to foresee future trends and measuring the seemingly immeasurable. More recently, I have been building out a Behavioural Economics practice with Wing Hsieh and the aspiration is to apply it to health and human services.

What can you tell us about your role at Deloitte and the work you're involved in?

I lead the Health Economics and Social Policy team in NSW and my main client includes a large state Communities and Justice agency. More recently, I have been leading human services work nationally in areas such as domestic and family violence, child protection and homelessness. My work tends to feed into policy and program design, planning from a demand and supply perspective, and monitoring and evaluation.

What Health projects have you worked on at Deloitte, and can you tell us about some of the skills or experiences you've gained?

My favourite projects are those that have a social equity lens to it, whether it's looking at the National Women's Health Strategy (gender equity) or evaluating programs and policies that are targeted at vulnerable groups. Having worked in the sector for more than ten years, I can find my way around all the relevant data sources in health and human services and understand their limitations (but also opportunities!).

I have also learnt a lot about qualitative research and data collection and how it can be used as an important complement to data. I also love being able to work with others in the sector and learning about how they approach health and human services such as our health technology leaders and our customer design and strategy teams.