Health
Sustainability is embedded within the faculty through recurring themes such as preventative health, diet, nutrition, health care with minimal intervention, environmental toxicology, health promotion and education, and hospital management.
Dr Joanne Gray, Associate Dean of Nursing UTS:
It’s a really big part of health, in terms of the cost of what’s happening in the health sector, and we know the increasing spend on health, we’ve got to be thinking very carefully about how we try and have a sustainable future.
So it goes down to very simple things like when we think about waste management in a hospital system, and we do introduce those concepts to our students very early on in the first year of the program, but almost to that bigger picture of how do we sustain our communities, sustain our homes so we are not having to build major hospitals, and major facilities but trying to sustain our community in a really positive way that is very health promoting as well.
A very complex waste system in a hospital, and our role I think as health professionals is to respect that and not be careless in how we manage waste, and so we do have for example in our labs downstairs, our clinical laboratories where students do a lot of their preparation for practice, we have different coloured bags as well, so we have ones that say yellow contaminated waste and that’s what you’ll find in the hospital setting.
In our third year of the bachelor of nursing students can choose an elective called Community Heath, and again that’s thinking about working in our community and tyring to think about, I suppose people talk about ‘nursing in the home’, and that’s part of it. So how do we stop the pressure on building hospitals and all of those (sic) infrastructure that costs so much and is a huge impact on our society. So how do we think about keeping people in their own home, how do we manage community health and health promotion as a preventative strategy.
In one of our undergraduate programs, the Bachelor of Midwifery, we’ve introduced a subject called International Perspectives and our idea in that subject was to think more broadly past our boarders and to think about developing countries.
Karina Lucan, Nursing student UTS:
Going to Thailand on this experiential nursing program really opened my eyes to how diverse health care is. We saw a mix of the good and bad. We did visit what they call the ‘Home of HIV’ which was in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t have any trained staff and very limited resources so it was really interesting to see, and then on the other side of that we went to these fabulous private hospitals that, you know, it felt more like an airport lobby or hotel rather than a hospital. So just to see the contrast between, I guess like, the rich and the poor. It was just amasing, absolutely amasing.
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Key sustainability staff include:
- Professor David Sibbritt who’s research areas include complementary and integrative medicine
- Distinguished Professor Caroline Homer who is interested in midwifery workforce issues and homebirth
- Professor Joanne Gray Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning who works on midwife education
- Associate Professor Michelle DiGiacomo who works in the areas of palliative care and smoking cessation in Aboriginal people
For more information contact the faculty or phone general enquiries 1300 275 887.