WHAT'S UP DOC? High school dropout Jane Nugent has taken a 30-year journey from cleaner to doctor.

Jane Nugent's first job in health was cleaning toilets. Remarkably, over a 30-year period she's transformed herself from school dropout to doctor.

"I kind of took the scenic route in medicine," she says, laughing.

"I don't dress like a doctor, I don't look like a doctor and I don't speak like a doctor. People are quite surprised. They think I'm a bag lady or something."

The inspirational 49-year-old has been a cleaner, nurse aide, nurse, pharmacologist, GP and psychiatric registrar.

Today she moves with her family to Adelaide "to see if I can reinvent myself again" in Australia, although she plans to keep work links with Christchurch.

Both her parents worked in factories as cleaners but moved to New Zealand for a better life in 1968 when Nugent was four.

It proved a rough start for the young Nugent, who was bullied for her English accent and changed schools frequently as a result.

"I just hated school. I never once passed a maths test."

Her dreams of becoming a meteorologist were shattered when she found school certificate maths was required.

At age 15, she dropped out of school and began working as a cleaner at Burwood Hospital.

"I was cleaning those toilets and doing the same thing every day, and just thinking, ‘I wish I could do something else. I can't do this until I'm 65, it's too hard'."

So she became a nurse aide.

While making beds, she dreamed of becoming a doctor "although I had really no idea what that actually meant or what I'd have to do to become a doctor".

Her mother encouraged her to train as an enrolled nurse when she was 18.

Years later, an experience with a patient re-ignited her niggling desires for more. "I had a patient who was in a lot of pain and I asked the registered nurse I was working with if I could give the patient morphine. She said that I needed to wait and give her some paracetamol.

"I just thought ‘I want to be a registered nurse because I don't ever want anyone telling me that I can't give my patient pain relief'."

So Nugent decided to train as a registered nurse, studying during the day and working as an enrolled nurse part-time at night.

The three-year course, which she finished in 1992, forced her to confront her struggles with maths and she sought tutoring.

"I learnt how to take a weakness and a threat and turn it into a strength and an opportunity.

"That's what I've done throughout my entire life. I just twist it around."

Her desire to learn more led her to complete a Bachelor of Science at Otago University, majoring in pharmacology, and a postgraduate diploma in pharmacology, the science of drugs, working throughout as a nurse in various departments at Dunedin Hospital.

She later began lecturing undergraduate nursing students at Otago Polytechnic in pharmacology.

While working as charge nurse in an aged-care mental-health ward, another experience with a patient finally pushed her into medicine.

An elderly woman had a fall and the medical consultant believed she was too sedated but Nugent diagnosed a condition called nephrogenic diabetes insipodus and set about proving it.

The consultant disagreed but two weeks later contacted her to say she had made an appointment for her with the dean of the medical school to discuss becoming a doctor.

The then 38-year-old was accepted for the six-year medical degree course, which was to prove her toughest challenge. "I still forgot that I couldn't do maths so physics, statistics and chemistry were really hard."

Nugent managed to scrape through those subjects but got A's for the rest, working most nights and weekends as a nurse for the first three years in Dunedin before shifting to Christchurch for the final three years.

After graduating in 2008, she studied psychiatry but missed hands-on medicine so she became a GP two years ago.

Nugent admits she has a short attention span and has dabbled in various medical roles. At her most recent job she was a casual psychiatric registrar at Hillmorton Hospital in Christchurch and worked for Otago University teaching nurse prescribing and pharmacology.

She remains grounded about her climb up the hospital ranks and has a deep admiration for nurses.

"I love nurses and nursing. It gave me a lot of opportunities and I wouldn't be where I am today without it.

"Nurses are not valued enough by the district health board."