Carole Heath knows what it's like to live next door to the world's most famous clock, Big Ben.
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As a trainee nurse she lived in the nurses' home of Westminster Hospital, with Big Ben "right outside my bedroom window".
Ms Heath, who this week took up her appointment as the new CEO of Cootamundra Nursing Home, lived in Westminster for four years, hearing the clock chime every quarter of an hour, including right through the night.
"Westminster Hospital isn't there any more - I think it's moved to Chelsea - but we didn't get woken by the noise - it's like living near a railway line, you don't hear the trains after a while," she said.
Most young nurses are attracted to working in "glamourous" areas like acute care or orthopaedics, but early on in her career Ms Heath opted for aged care, an area she has been passionate about ever since, working as a nurse in three countries - England, New Zealand and Australia.
Asked when she started, she said "you don't want to know - let's just say I've been doing aged care a long time".
She loves aged care, describing it as "the forgotten area of nursing", demanding a wider range of triage skills and also connecting more with people than in other kinds of nursing.
"You become part of people's lives and their families," she said, "You get involved with their families because you have them with you a lot longer - in acute care you normally just see somebody for a week or two, then they're gone."
Ms Heath says dementia and memory loss have increased dramatically over recent years, for a number of reasons: pressures of work, younger ones coming in with binge drinking and drug use, head injuries from car accidents and quad bikes and the like, and people just living longer than they used to.
"People are living longer these days - it used to be rare to have hundredth birthdays, now you have one a year sometimes, and 104 or 105 is nothing."
A downside in recent years is the requirement for more and more red tape and paperwork.
"When I started you could do this job and work on the floor as well, but now that's almost impossible."
Ms Heath has four grandchildren, in Sydney and in England, "more if you count my husband's".
"I have two sons older than me - people say how did you manage that and I just say I was born clever!"
Ms Heath has worked in all states of Australia except WA, and came to Cootamundra because she likes living in rural areas.
"I'm not a big city person - I worked in Sydney for a year, and if I drive back there now to see the kids my hands get whiter and whiter with the traffic."
