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Tertiary health students are hoping to inspire secondary school students to follow a career path in health. Pictured are Min Xin Lee, Lilian Jones and Danielle Drake.
Still studying for their own health qualifications, a group of seven tertiary students are helping inspire secondary students from rural areas to follow in their footsteps.
The medical, nursing, psychology, youth and pharmacy students visited Marton’s Rangitīkei College as part of the Rural Health Network’s bid to tackle a severe lack of health professionals in rural communities.
Lilian Jones, a fifth-year medical student at Otago University, originally from Wairarapa, said the road trip visiting six schools in five days was a great opportunity to help younger students explore career options.
Their presentations involved an overview of health careers and how to get there, followed by activities including blood pressure and reflex checks, memory games and learning what’s in a pharmacy.
Psychology student Amelia Romijn said many of the students were interested in knowing what subjects they should be taking at school if they wanted to go on to health studies.
She was able to give them more specific details about the sort of health careers they were interested in, for example, explaining the different pathways to psychology and psychiatry.
Jones said it was helpful to get that sort of guidance from someone who was on the pathway, rather than have to grapple with the vast amount of information available online.
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Rangitīkei College students take part in activities that tertiary health students hope will inspire them into careers in health.
She said if they inspired just one person to be interested in a health career, that would be a success.
“You will never be out of a job.
“Rural communities are really short of all kinds of health care practitioners.
“If the students have had fun, are interested and engaged, those are good signs.”
They were also able to help explain the particular pathways into tertiary education in health that were available to rural students as part of efforts to create a workforce that reflected the makeup of New Zealand’s population.
The tertiary students’ roadshow is part of Hauora Tawhenua/Rural Health Network’s rural health careers programme.
Hauora Taiwhenua chief executive Grant Davidson said international evidence showed students from rural backgrounds were more likely to return to rural communities after studying than other students.
“Half of all rural practices currently have vacancies, and some of those vacancies have been open for a year or more,” Davidson said.
“Some rural practices have no doctors at the moment, as well as being short of nurses and other health workers, or they’ve closed their books to new patients and are unable to service the community that they’re there for.”
