A cardiologist with a lifelong passion for improving heart failure outcomes and a Professor of Nursing focused on supporting patients with cardiovascular disease are among those recognised in the 2026 Australia Day honours.
Professor Andrew Sindone, director of the Heart Failure Unit at Concord Repatriation and General Hospital, has been appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to cardiology and to cardiovascular disease research.
Professor Sindone reflected that back when he was doing his medical training, there was little optimism when it came to heart failure.
“I remember when I went to a lecture when I was a physician trainee, and they said, ‘If you’ve got heart failure, you’re going to die. There’s not much you can do about it,’” he told the limbic.
Decades on, the landscape looks very different as cutting-edge treatments have become available to Australian patients. “Now, instead of pessimism, we’ve got a big degree of optimism,” Professor Sindone said.
The speciality now has a range of treatment weapons it can leverage to improve the lives of patients.
Professor Andrew Sindone, Director Heart Failure Unit and Dept of Cardiac Rehabilitation, Concord Hospital, NSW
“If we can make [patients] feel better, live longer and get them out of hospital, they are our three goals.”
Professor Sindone has contributed significantly to that progress, including with time spent on pharmaceutical advisory boards to help bring new treatments to Australia, and through his authorship of Australian and international guidelines.
While he had seen plenty of improvements in patient care throughout his career, there was still work to do, he said.
“There’s still a long way to go as far as the inequity between city and the country. People in non-metropolitan places have longer length of stays and higher cardiovascular mortality.”
Professor Sindone remained with a range of research projects for new investigational agents for heart failure.
“At the moment our big push is for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. It has almost as high mortality as heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. We’ve got a couple of treatments now that make some differences, but it’s mainly only reducing hospitalisation, not improving survival yet,” he said.
“That’s the next big challenge: heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.”
Heart failure is a growing epidemic, he said, but this was not because clinicians were doing something wrong.
“It’s because we’re doing something right. People are living longer with their heart failure,” he said.
“It’s about trying to improve their quality of life, but also making them live longer with all those other co-morbidities, so that they can continue to live productive and enjoyable lives.”
Professor Robyn Gallagher awarded AO
Meanwhile, The University of Sydney Professor Robyn Gallagher was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to nursing academia, cardiovascular health and disease prevention research, rehabilitation and tertiary education.
Professor Gallagher’s career has focused on cardiac rehabilitation, supporting patients with cardiovascular disease to reduce their risk of future heart events.
It’s an area she developed a passion early on in her nursing career while working in cardiac intensive care.
“I thought, why do some people come back [to hospital], while other people we never see again?” she told the limbic.
University of Sydney Professor Robyn Gallagher has spent decades researching new approaches to cardiac rehabilitation.
“I got motivated to move out of the intensive care unit and start talking to patients and their family about what they can do for prevention and how they can manage themselves so they can live a good life and not come back to hospital.”
In the years since, Professor Gallagher has pioneered new tools to support behaviour change in cardiac patients, including use of apps and virtual trackers.
But there still hasn’t been enough change in the way the Australian health systems run cardiac rehab programs, she noted. It was important to encourage multidisciplinary collaboration and involve patients in co-designing programs.
“When it’s working well, it’s multidisciplinary, so you have cardiologists and nurses and physios working together and you also have patients involved every step of the way,” she said.
Professor Gallagher said her first thought on hearing of her Australia Day honour was: “My parents would have been so proud”.
Growing up in the outback in Western Queensland, she was the first in her family to finish high school.
Her career journey has emphasised the value that those from different backgrounds can bring to healthcare, she said.
Winning the University of Sydney vice-chancellor’s Award for HDR Supervisor of the Year 2023 was one of her career’s proudest moments, recognising her commitment to helping the next generation of researchers.
“It reflected on the huge effort I put into growing people and seeing them develop with high standards… that was certainly a very big moment,” she said.