General News
30 August, 2024
Students explore career opportunities
Local secondary school students with a passion for all things health caught a glimpse of just what the field has to offer recently.
Held last Friday at the Maryborough District Health Service’s (MDHS) Health and Movement Centre, the Come and Try Day showcased career opportunities locally through a series of workshops involving exercise physiology, speech therapy, physiotherapy and allied health assistance.
The event, which was attended by year nine and 10 students from Highview College and the Maryborough Education Centre, was provided thanks to the partnership between MDHS, Goldfields Local Learning and Employment Network (LLEN), Bendigo Health Hospital and Rural Workforce Agency Victoria.
According to Bendigo Health Loddon Mallee Allied Health Workforce project lead Sarah Gallagher, the partnership aims to promote career pathways to tackle staffing issues across the sector.
“There are a lot of shortages around allied health jobs, so the Loddon Mallee Health Network recognised that they needed a project to look at different ways of recruitment and retention,” she said.
“That’s where the partnership comes in — as health services we can offer the clinicians with real-life experience that can interest the students and LLEN has the partnerships with the schools and the knowledge of how to run these programs.
“If we didn’t have partnerships with schools, LLEN and career practitioners, it would be hard to recruit staff effectively.”
The initiative aims to build on the Loddon Campaspe Health Sector — Skills and Pathways Road Map (2021), which states a key focus area is to address the perception that working in rural locations is undesirable compared to other opportunities in the health industry.
To combat this issue, Ms Gallagher said it’s essential to promote local pathways to future employers to create a sustainable health workforce.
“It’s really vital that we are inspiring our local students and showing them what’s possible locally,” she said.
“We know from the evidence that if you train up country kids, they are much more likely to get them to come back to rural and regional jobs.
“We are not super visible, we have pretty complicated jobs like occupational therapy and if you can’t explain that to a high school student, how are you going to get them interested in it?
“This program is showing that it’s not just nursing and medicine which are very valuable, but there are lots of different ways you can contribute to your community and help the care of people that you love.”
Students also got the chance to engage with local clinicians and allied health professionals including MDHS Allied Health team leader Lauren Dowling, who said it was important to showcase the various careers available locally.
“When most people think of jobs in health care they think of doctors and nurses when in fact there are over 20 other fields in allied health,” she said.
“It also helps showcase the different pathways into the field, most people think you have got to do a four-year degree straight away to get into an allied health profession when in fact we have got lots of staff who started in nursing or as an allied health assistant.
“Hopefully this will encourage some of these students to come back for work experience. We get students from MEC and Highview usually mid-year for work experience so hopefully it opens their eyes that it's an option for them.”
Highview College student Charlotte said the event was a valuable experience in helping her decide her future career.
“My year level coordinator had told us about it and told us to contact her if it was something we wanted to do,” she said.
“I was hoping to experience the different pathways in the medical field and get a bit of an idea of what I want to do.
“I do want to do something in the medical industry, allied health has been an interest to me so I would probably do that.”
