Types of Healthcare Settings (Video 7)

Presenter:
What can you expect an Australian healthcare setting to be like? Let’s hear from some people who know.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
The types of hospitals you might experience in Australia would basically come into three distinct categories. The larger metropolitan hospitals which are tertiary referral, where all of continuing or higher level of care comes to, they are very busy - they are always busy, there isn’t a time of year where there is a lull for them anymore. So if you work in these sorts of environments you’re often working in teams within teams and there’s lots of scope for development and interaction and all those, I suppose involvement in other projects.

Nursing Student (Nigeria):
So down here there is a lot of time spent on the patient, like explaining things to them, telling what they have and why they are having it, and respecting the patients’ rights, over here. But over there (Nigeria) is not much into that, they don’t go into that much you know. We also do carry equipments, which is quite important like, they don’t have a lot of equipments there as they do here.

Clinical Facilitator (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
When we look at our patient’s safety in the Australian healthcare setting, particularly when we’re looking at nursing students and with their interactions with patients - that’s the ultimate, their interactions, their activities, the technical aspects of their care must be safe. If they are not safe, if our students aren’t safe in their process, in their practices then they can’t progress from the level of Prac that they’re on.

Lecturer (School of Nursing and Midwifery, QUT):
In small areas you often have fluxes in times. So you might have an extremely busy time and then a lull where it allows you to do all the other things that other people might be employed to do in the larger environments. So I think that’s an interesting thing to be aware of. The other thing is in Australian healthcare systems the informality that we have in our culture working together also permeates into the working environment. We don’t often stand on titles, we get to have personal relationship with people that we work with and personal relationships in that we are informal in these relationships and that’s something that is different to other cultural areas. Respect is still there, but it’s just in a different way.