Congratulating the First Nations, Health Promotion and Equity Teaching team on winning the Award for Excellence in Place-based Initiatives

The heart of this is purposeful and meaningful engagement and collaboration with our students, staff, alumni, and partners to achieve shared outcomes that are for the benefit of our communities and society.

In this category, the Award for Excellence in Place-based Initiatives recognises outstanding collaborative initiatives in Melbourne, regional and remote areas. We are delighted to congratulate the the Department of Physiotherapy’s First Nations, Health Promotion and Equity Teaching Team who won this award for the Healthcare in Context (HCC) Program. The team included Dr Rachel Toovey, Free Coulston, Ellie White, Jessica Lees and Prof Louisa Remedios.

HCC is a community engagement program that has introduced service-based learning to the Doctor of Physiotherapy (DPT) curriculum for the last 10 years, forming the capstone project for the course since 2015. The program is a unique-blended mentorship model designed to put theory into practice through assisting small groups of students to learn from, with and for a community, while completing an ethical and effective needs-analysis and health promotion project.

This program is an innovative approach to teach about health determinants, equity, and promotion by integrating service learning with community engagement. Through aligning advanced professional learning standards with the University graduate attributes, HCC has been acknowledged by the national accrediting body, The Australian Physiotherapy Council, as an outstanding program within physiotherapy practice. It was originally designed in response to two key challenges in the curricula: the limitations of traditional classroom teaching of determinants of health, which is an essential contextual framework for effective physiotherapy practice; and the professional requirement to extend the scope of physiotherapy practice to health promotion and injury and disease prevention. This uniquely situated program allows students to build their advocacy and project management skills to deliver community-specific health promotion projects.

HCC links students to communities, aligning with the University aspiration for community engagement and impact. Since 2015, the team has developed relationships with 120+ communities, across Melbourne, regional and rural areas such as The Collingwood Community Football Club, Rumbalara Aboriginal Co-operative in Shepparton, and Beaufort Skipton Health Service. Student groups have also engaged with under-resourced communities in Sri Lanka and Kenya. In addition to providing each community with a health promotion project every year, students have built curriculum resources used for teaching, increased awareness of communities using social media, disseminated their work at local and international conferences and won external awards.