Barbara Docherty is a retired nurse, blogger and university lecturer who has worked widely in the fields of primary health care nursing and the media. She has special expertise in training health professionals to assist patients to make healthy lifestyle choices.
Barbara was also a member of several New Zealand Health Boards, and in 1997 received a New Zealand Nurses Organisation award for services to nursing and midwifery.
Born in Auckland, she spent many years in Christchurch and the remote Chatham Islands, but now resides in Wellington.
“Barbara Docherty’s life is one of light and shadow: loss and resilience, silence and truth. In Secrets and Lemons, she tells it all, with clarity and courage. …
[Her] story is woven into a backdrop of some of the most fundamental social issues New Zealand faced. She writes of them not in an abstract way but as blows that landed squarely on her own life ….
In these pages you will encounter honesty of a
rare and affecting kind. The kind that exposes things most of us would keep buried. This is how it was, and this is what it was like to live it. ~ Paula Penfold