For people living with complex invisible illness, receiving a diagnosis is often only the beginning. The real work of rebuilding function — safely, sustainably, and without harm — sits largely within allied health.
Jess leads Biio’s allied health team as a single, connected clinical system rather than a collection of separate professions. Her role ensures observations made in one discipline meaningfully inform the work of another, so care compounds rather than resets.
Her leadership is grounded in teaching, curiosity, and relationship. Jess creates environments where clinicians feel safe to think out loud, ask questions, and learn from one another. She supports practitioners to see beyond the limits of their own discipline, to understand how their work lands in a complex body, and to collaborate with confidence and respect. Under her leadership, referral is not a sign of limitation — it is a sign that the system is working.
Jess’s commitment to serving those with invisible illness is born of deep lived experience. She knows firsthand the exhaustion of navigating a healthcare system that cannot see the full picture — of repeating your story, managing conflicting advice, and carrying the responsibility for coordination when your capacity is already limited.
That experience shaped not only how she practices, but how she leads our team. Alongside her clinical training, Jess pursued formal education in health leadership and health professional education. She wanted to change how care is delivered — for patients, and for the clinicians trying to support them.
Jess’s clinical interests sit at the intersection of connective tissue disorders, hypermobility, dysautonomia, POTS, fatigue, and complex presentations — areas where structural differences, nervous system regulation, and energy capacity are tightly intertwined.
She understands that movement is never just mechanical. Joint stability affects confidence and autonomic load. Pain alters motor patterns and threat responses. Fatigue changes how and when bodies can adapt. Jess prioritises pacing, safety, and function over performance, helping people rebuild trust in their bodies without triggering crashes or setbacks.
Her background in dance and performing arts medicine adds depth to this work. Supporting professional touring productions including Moulin Rouge!, Frozen and & Juliet sharpened her ability to recognise patterns traditional assessments often miss — particularly in hypermobile bodies required to perform at elite levels while managing injury, pain, or instability.
Before joining Biio, Jess led the Complex Care Coordination Service within WA Health’s hospital system, working across allied health, nursing, medical teams and general practice to support patients whose needs exceeded the capacity of any single service.
In this role, she navigated the realities of large systems under pressure — time constraints, siloed services, competing priorities — while still holding care together for people with high complexity. She learned how collaboration fails when it relies on goodwill alone, and what it takes to build shared understanding across professional boundaries in real-world conditions.
At Biio, allied health and medical care are not parallel streams — they are woven together. Jess works in close partnership with Medical Lead Dr Michaelia Verbeek to ensure that allied and medical reasoning remain visible to one another, and that care is sequenced thoughtfully. Together, they bring warmth, clarity, and curiosity into spaces that are often dominated (and limited) by hierarchy or defensiveness. Patients feel believed and protected. Clinicians feel supported, respected, and enabled.