Rachel Mouer

I really liked the way that the courses were laid out online.  It was helpful being able to work through the material in your own time, as well as being easy to navigate to find specific content you wanted to revise as needed.

The course content provided insight and frameworks to broader principles of health care, such as models of care and evaluation processes. The content gave us tools that could be used to help establish ourselves as leaders within our workplaces. They are also the sort of skills that can be widely applied and are valuable regardless of the specific area of practice that you work in.

The learnings were further consolidated through the assignment tasks where we could apply the skills to our own work environment, helping us to immediately put our learning into practice.

I also really enjoyed the discussion boards and found that these were a great way for students to connect with each other and helped apply the knowledge to practice.  It was fascinating to be able to see perspectives from people with different areas of clinical experience and expertise, working in different health systems both interstate and overseas.  I found that the breadth of perspectives really helped to consider the content from a broader lens.

The discussion boards along with some regular webinars helped us to connect with our subject tutors and course coordinators, who were also really approachable and helpful throughout the subjects.

I really liked the range of subjects that the University of Melbourne (UoM) provided.  I found that many other courses focused on specific clinical aspects of practice (such as subjects dedicated to particular conditions) and I felt that I already had several well-established pathways for developing my knowledge and skills in this way.

While UoM had a few elective subjects like this, they also had many subjects on broader skills such as evaluation of practice and health behaviour changes, and these were areas that I felt would be beneficial to study further as I did not feel that the pathways for developing these skills were not as well established for clinicians.

I’m currently the physiotherapist for Fight Parkinson’s which is a charity organisation and the Victorian state-peak body for Parkinson’s.

My father lives with Parkinson’s, as did his father and it’s an area I care very deeply about.  It’s a privilege to be able to work in a role where I can provide support and advocacy for those affected by this condition every day.

Being a state-wide organisation, we provide education and information around a diverse range of areas; and many of the broader areas studied during the course such as models of care, principles of evaluation of practice and health behaviour change are very applicable daily to my role.  Having a better foundation of knowledge in these spaces has helped me to feel more confident in my role and to more effectively contribute to work in these spaces.