News Archive

The high regard in which the community holds our University - in no small measure because of our contribution to the social and economic wellbeing of the State - was evident again in the large numbers who attended our recent UWA Open Day.

The strong community interest in our activities and courses - with possibly one of the biggest crowds ever - reflects very positively on our new curriculum plans. It suggests wide community support for New Courses 2012 which will deliver strong educational outcomes for new generations of graduates, ultimately benefiting the State as a whole.

Our University has always responded to the needs of the communities it serves. For example, in medicine and health related fields, we have established significant initiatives to address pressing community needs.

Supporting calls for increased numbers of highly qualified nurses, we recently graduated the first cohort of 16 mature-age students who were the first to become Registered Nurses after completing our new two-year full-time Master of Nursing Science.

The first cohort of graduates, whose ages ranged from 26 to 50, came from a diverse range of backgrounds including arts, commerce, education, medicine and science. Their course included more than 800 hours of practical nursing experience to prepare them well to meet the challenges of care delivery in a changing environment.

About the same time our nursing graduates were celebrating the completion of their course, we opened a new Podiatric Surgery Clinic at the University. It will encourage clinical research in podiatric surgery, offer reduced fees for elective foot surgery patients and provide much-needed training for postgraduate students. The new centre is the first podiatric surgery teaching facility in Australia to be licensed by a State Department of Health as a Class-B Day Hospital.

Responding to another community need in health - particularly in remote and regional parts of our nation - our University is continuing to address concerns about the number of doctors willing to live and work in regional areas.

For more than a decade, our University's Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences has been aware of this need and has developed a highly successful rural student recruitment program and undergraduate placements through the Rural Clinical School.

The recruitment program uses ‘road shows' into rural WA schools to increase awareness of medicine and dentistry as a career option for academically able rural students. We provide rural students in Years 10-12 with information, support and exposure to role models in medicine and dentistry.

We've managed to increased rural entry to medicine from three per cent of students to 25 per cent of students and we have established a Rural Clinical School (in partnership with the University of Notre Dame Australia) which is recognised and awarded nationally for its outstanding programs.

One of the most important measures of our performance as a University will always be the quality and extent of our contribution to the communities we serve. It remains our driving force.

Vice-Chancellor Alan Robson

• UWA News 22 August 2011