‘Gritty’ uni turning first-generation tertiary students into healthcare workers of the future
We can’t afford to keep training healthcare workers who lack the resilience to stay in the industry long-term. Is this century-old university’s approach the answer?
There is a revolution happening out west that may just help shape the future of healthcare across Australia.
The Victoria University (VU) Footscray campus where it is percolating is a mix of brick buildings more gritty and solid than sleek and fancy. That’s why the locals love it.
It started life as the Footscray Technical School in 1916 promising a “door of opportunity” for local students and even when it was renamed Victoria University in 2005 that ethos hasn’t changed.
Almost half of its students today are the first in their family to go to university and statistics show 93.4 per cent of them will complete their degree.
VU Professor of Public Health Karen Willis has been educating healthcare workers for more than 30 years.
She is using that expertise to help develop ways to future-proof this next generation, “because we can’t afford to keep training healthcare workers that are not going to stay in healthcare”.
Professor Willis co-led a research project with respiratory physician Professor Natasha Smallwood about frontline health workers during Covid that identified “significant burnout, PTSD, anxiety and depression”.
The results became the Future Proofing the Frontline project.
Willis said initially it was to examine the psychosocial impact of the pandemic on health workers, but evolved into how organisations could better protect the mental health of frontline workers during crises.
Resilient workers
“What we found was that most health organisations did try and protect the mental health of their workers, but they focused on individual resilience. We found that actually health care workers …are a very resilient group anyway. The issues were really with the organisational responses to health care workers.”
Willis says there is a great opportunity for the new Footscray Hospital to lead in this space. She says it can do this by building an organisational culture that prioritises mental health, have strategies for health crises and address staff mental health and wellbeing.
VU is well known for its physical science programs, law and psychology but also for educating hundreds of healthcare students.
They are attracted not only by the closeness of the campus to the new $1.5b Footscray Hospital across the road, but the university’s unique approach to education.
It uses the VU Block Model, the first university in Australia to do so, and students say they love it because they do one unit at a time in four week “blocks”.
Giorgia Liberato, 25, is studying physiotherapy and says it gives her a good life and university balance.
“I do face-to-face classes three days a week and I can still work part-time,” she says.
Liberato did an undergraduate degree in sports science at VU and said she jumped at the opportunity to do a double degree. “I fell in love with how VU runs the structure of the course. It gives you flexibility.”
Psychology student Adam Friend, 22, saw it as a sign he was on the right career path when moved from country Victoria to study just as work on the new hospital began.
The VU campus where he is doing a Bachelor of Psychology with Honours is across the road, his student accommodation was a few doors up.
“As I progressed with my degree, so did the hospital build, I watched it grow from the ground up.” Friend said.
Block model
So why move more than 300km to study in Melbourne’s west? “The VU Block Model is a good fit for me,” Friend says.
It is a common theme for many of the healthcare students attending the university that has former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks as its seventh chancellor.
They are Australia’s future nurses, midwives, paramedics, social workers, physiotherapists, osteopaths, psychologist, exercise science experts and nutritionists.
Cody Tuder, 20, will do his masters in osteopathy here and has dreams of one day working with an AFL club like the Western Bulldogs, also conveniently headquartered up the road with close links to VU’s highly regarded sports science program.
Ngoc Le, 23, was determined to study social work, despite her parents’ reservations. She said social work was not well understood in Vietnamese culture.
When her father was diagnosed with liver cancer she returned to Vietnam to help nurse him and put her studies on hold.
“He passed away in 2022. During the time when I took care of my dad I felt like there was no such support, no emotional support for the patient and the family as well,” Le said.
She returned to Australia and to her studies and did a placement at Western Health in the general medicine and palliative care unit.
Le now wants to focus on palliative care, ideally at the new Footscray Hospital because she says after the difficult time her family had before her father passed away in Vietnam, she wants to help other patients and their families on a similar journey.
For Daisy Shaw, 19, coming to VU is a family tradition. Her mum Iris also studied here.
Shaw is doing speech pathology because it combines her love of languages and health.
“Because with speech pathology, there’s so many pathways that you can go into. People just think of stuttering and lisps and other speech impediments, but it’s so much more than that. It is strokes, traumatic brain injuries, swallowing; nursing home care.
“Also, especially with people with autism, because I have autism myself. So I kind of want to change how it works and to make it have better outcomes for autistic people that are beneficial for them.”
Gina Kruger heads the Nursing and Midwifery program at VU that oversees the education of around 1500 students.
Professor Kruger knows all too well the issues of sustainability; keeping graduates working in healthcare beyond two to three years.
She says it is about having contemporary programs.
“By sustainability I mean that a lot of graduates across Australia start work as registered nurses or midwives, then two or three years into their careers say, ‘no, I don’t want to do this now’, so this is where in our programs we’re looking at things like human skills, building resilience, professional leadership to educate the nurses and midwives of tomorrow,” Kruger said.
“We have a large population (in the west), the growth corridor is really big around Wyndham region, so Werribee, even Melton. There’s a new hospital being built that’s part of Western Health and Werribee Mercy, they all need ready-to-go graduate registered nurses and midwives.”
Kruger refers to the students as educated, not trained. “That’s old hat,” she said. “Education encompasses the growth of the whole professional.”
David Schreurs, 33, says he didn’t chose the west, it chose him. The former video producer is now planning a career in nursing.
“I felt like I needed to find something that would be able to sustain my spirit, in a sense, be able to be a good reason for me to get up out of bed every day and embrace the world,” Schreurs said.
Now in his second year of a Bachelor of Nursing he said after doing some of his mental health units, that’s where his interest is.
“All across the west … the rates of depression, anxiety are high. It feels like we need some more people in the game.”
Willis says the bridge that connects VU with the new hospital is as symbolic as it will be practical.
“I think it’s a really powerful symbol of what the hospital and the university can do together.”
More Coverage
Originally published as ‘Gritty’ uni turning first-generation tertiary students into healthcare workers of the future
Inside Pt Augusta Tech College: Where skipping school isn’t an option
26 million days: The stunning work toll of Gen Z ‘mental health days’
‘Made my daughter cry’: How to help young people become resilient
TAFE fail: Shock data exposes hidden non-completion crisis
Uni WFH disaster revealed: Hear the audio that sparked exec’s exit
