This transcript is for the video Bachelor of Midwifery info session
Deborah: Good morning, my name is Deborah Fox, thank you for joining us for today’s online info session about The Bachelor of Midwifery at UTS. To start this session, I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands and I’d like to pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land.
Deborah: So as I said, my name is Deborah Fox, and I’m the course coordinator of the Bachelor of Midwifery at UTS and I also conduct research into optimizing physiological processes for women with complexities and risk factors in pregnancy. I’d like to also introduce my colleagues and our wonderful students who’ve joined us today. And first of all, I’ll start with Professor Kathleen Baird.
Kathleen: Thank you. Thank you, Deb. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our virtual open day session. It’s lovely to have you along with us this morning. So I have been I’ve had the privilege of being a midwife for over 25 years. I did my midwifery training the three year program in Scotland, in the U.K. and I’ve worked in all different models of midwifery care. And I arrived as an academic, midwifery, academic in Australia 10 years ago. And I have the great privilege of being the midwifery discipline lead for our program. I, like Deborah, I also do research so my research is in all different models of midwifery care, but a particular focus on vulnerable groups of populations with a focus on family violence during pregnancy. So it’s lovely to have this chance to virtually talk to you all this morning.
Deborah: Thank you, Kathleen. And and next, I’d like to introduce Loretta Musgrave.
Loretta: Good morning and welcome to the UTS Open Day. My name’s Loretta and I’m a midwifery lecturer here at UTS, and I specialize in complexity in pregnancy. And I also am conducting research, looking at smartphone applications as a behaviour change, intervention in pregnancy and generally for women of reproductive age. And I’ve got experience in working in birth centres. And I have worked for 21 years in the public health service prior to coming to UTS. I’m also a registered nurse and I’ve been a registered nurse for 25 years. So I have dual registration and I bring all my experience to UTS and to The Bachelor of Midwifery, particularly the second year looking after the clinical subjects. Nice to meet you all.
Deborah: Thank you, Loretta. And moving on to Dr Annabel Sheehy.
Annabel: Hello, everyone. I’m so excited to be connecting with you all albeit through a computer screen. I am a midwife and I have been educated via UTS. I was in the first intake of The Bachelor of Midwifery, so I can attest how wonderful this university is. I love UTS. So I’ve been a midwife clinically since I started the course in 2005. And I teach mainly the first year. And I teach anatomy physiology. I teach the clinical subjects in those clinical subjects. You will get to learn they’re called midwifery practice subject. And I also do research. And my research focuses on the early career period of new midwives. And so I’m glad you could all join us. So welcome.
Deborah: Thank you, Annabel. And moving on now to Heike Roth.
Heike: Good morning, everyone, and welcome. My name is Heike and I’m also a bachelor midwifery graduate from here, UTS. I was in the cohort that graduated in 2008, which was just after Annabel’s. And I’ve since then also continued on further study through UTS, which was Honours and some postgraduate training in adult education and I’ve recently also submitted my Ph.D. So it’s very exciting. And I’m also very, very proud to be UTS I guess, graduate alumni and now teaching also within the team here in midwifery. So I’ve got 13 years of experience as a midwife and work in all areas of midwifery. I really look forward to meeting you all and look forward to your questions. Thank you.
Deborah: Thank you Heike. And we do have some other wonderful midwifery team members who are not with us today. We didn’t want to make the panel too big because we’d have to spend the whole webinar introducing ourselves. But next, I would like to introduce a very special person, Katie Burnett, who is our senior clinical administration officer. Katie looks after all the placement arrangements, hospital placement and clinical placement arrangements for our students. So good morning, Katie.
Katie: Morning. Morning. Yes. Yeah. Good morning and welcome. I can’t see you all, but it’s normally lovely to know that you’re there. And I as Deb said, I organized all the administration sort of clinical placements for the Bachelor of Midwifery and also ensuring that the correct documentation has been submitted. That’s police checks, vaccinations to New South Wales Health. So it’s very nice to be a part of this panel today and look forward to meeting you at some point.
Deborah: Thank you so much, Katie. And another very special person is Jacqueline, one of our wonderful third-year students in the bachelor of midwifery, and I’m sure that you’ll be keen to pick her brains later. Jacqueline, would you like to introduce yourself?
Jacqueline: Yes. Welcome, everybody. It’s lovely to be here for the second year in a row doing this virtually. As Deb said, I’m a third-year student finishing up hopefully at the end of this year. I came into the degree as a mature age student. I have two boys. I’m a former accountant turned midwife and haven’t looked back. I absolutely love it. I can attest to all the statements that the academics have said. Yeah, I look forward to, you know, hopefully getting to give you some more information today.
Deborah: Thank you so much, Jacqueline. And we have lots of diversity in our student cohort. We have a wonderful mixture of students who’ve recently left school and also more mature students. And I was one of those. I started my B.Mid in my 40s and was a musician prior to that. And we have lots and lots of students who’ve had other careers prior, as you heard from Jacqueline. We also have psychologists, physiotherapists and musicians. We’ve had a TV producer. We’ve had a wonderful range of very interesting people, which makes our course very rich environment.
Deborah: So today’s session, we’re going to present some information and then there’s an opportunity for you to ask us your questions, so please do. We’re going to invite you to type your questions into the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel. And we will respond after the course presentation. You may receive your answer and text reply from one of the panellists or from a member of our Faculty of Health marketing team who are here to help us moderate the Q&A. Then being an online event. Please bear with us. If there are any technical issues, we hope they won’t. That will work to resolve them quickly. If there are if you find you’re not able to access the webinar at any point, we suggest you log out and log back in again, because that often resolves the issues.
Deborah: All right, so onto our course information. So just to define what is a midwife? Midwives provide support for women and their families throughout pregnancy, labour and birth. And then for up to six weeks after the birth. And we’re very proud to be consistently ranked first in Australia for nursing and midwifery education and currently ranked 11th in the world for nursing and midwifery. So we’re very proud of that.
Deborah: So students who successfully complete our B.Mid program are eligible to register with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency known as AHPRA, which is the regulation agency that all health professionals in Australia must be registered with in order to practice. So our graduates can then practice as a midwife. And the definition of a midwife is a health professional who, in partnership with a woman, provides individualized specialist care, evidence-based information, support, pregnancy, childbirth, post-natal and the early parenting period. And increasingly also providing preconception care. Midwives can work in the community in birth centres, hospitals and in women’s homes. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Deborah: The philosophy of woman centred care underpins our course and the profession of midwifery and woman centred care is care that addresses the social, emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual and cultural needs of each and every individual woman we care for. So that philosophy of woman centred care is something you will hear about nearly every day of the course. It’s a very, very important. So we put the woman at the centre of our priorities at all times. And it’s important for you to know, as you are interested in perhaps studying midwifery, that midwifery is very much about working with women to grow and give birth to and nurture their babies and to become parents. It’s not about working with babies. So if you are particularly keen to work with babies, we recommend you. You explore nursing. You may be interested in getting into paediatric nursing or neonatal intensive care or perhaps early childhood education. But midwifery is very much about working alongside women.
Deborah: So why do students choose to study at our Bachelor of Midwifery at UTS? Well, it’s a well-established and highly sought after course and was the first Bachelor of Midwifery offered in New South Wales. The very first Bachelor of Midwifery in Australia started just a few years before in Victoria. So the Bachelor of Midwifery courses have been alive and well across Australia now for 20 years. UTS is a top rated as well, above world standard in Australia for nursing and midwifery research. So not only are we first in the country for teaching and learning, but we also well above world standard for our research. And all your lecturers are also actively involved in in research.
Deborah: You’ll study in the state of the art, educational, midwifery, clinical facilities, we have a purpose built and specifically designed floor full of simulation laboratories, full of wonderful equipment that you can use to learn all your skills before you go out into the hospital environment. And you will learn from expert, passionate staff who remain engaged in industry and conduct research that is continually fed back into the curriculum. So our research informs the renewal of the curriculum as we go past. And excitingly, we’re starting a new curriculum next year. So those of you interested in starting next year will have the freshest curriculum there is.
Deborah: So just a few details about the Bachelor of Midwifery. Our selection rank for 2021 for this year was ninety-nine point nine five. So it is very competitive. We usually accept about 15 percent, one five, 15 per cent of the applicants. We wish we could open up a lot more places, but we are limited by the number of educational places we can access in the clinical environment. So it’s a very important part of your course that you have access to full learning experience in clinical settings. So we must make sure that everyone is able to access that.
Deborah: It’s a three-year full-time degree. We do not offer a part time and we only offer an autumn intake. So you can’t defer your offer and you’re unable to start in spring. So I know that as a result of the recent announcements about HSC changes, UTS has advertised that there are a lot of courses available to start in spring, but our Bachelor Midwifery will start in autumn. But rest assured that UTS is going to make sure that we cater for those of you finishing your HSC. So don’t worry about that. More information is coming out as we speak.
Deborah: We have a very high graduate employment rate, which is usually 100 per cent, and graduates work in New South Wales in public and private facilities, in privately practicing midwifery practices and also interstate and overseas. Many of our graduates go on to do an honours degree and get into research as well.
Deborah: We also offer a double degree, the Bachelor of Midwifery and Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. And if you’re interested in thinking outside the box and thinking in a transdisciplinary way, this may interest you. And I would invite you to have a look on the website at more about this course. And the selection rank this year for that was also ninety nine point nine five. And it’s a four-year full-time course. So in addition to the exact same Bachelor midwifery subjects that the standalone course offers, you also some study, some subjects with students from all different faculties, which is very much around transverse transdisciplinary thinking, dealing with wicked problems and thinking outside the box. So it’s also autumn intake and offers cannot be deferred. So a very interesting option for those of you with an interest in innovation.
Deborah: The structure of the course is similar to other health professional course structures, but there are some key differences. So explain that now, every session, autumn and spring sessions in some universities, these are called semesters, we call them sessions because we also have summer and winter sessions. But for the Bachelor of Midwifery, it’s autumn and spring. And you have four subjects per session. And during each session and between each session, you will also have clinical placements. So you may go to a hospital for clinical placement. You may go to a privately practicing midwife for a clinical placement. Or you may go to a special community facility for your clinical placement. And that can happen at any time during the year. Not just in in session time, you will also be recruiting and caring for 20 women who are pregnant and you will follow them through their pregnancy, their labour, their birth and through to six weeks after birth, walking alongside them, developing a relationship with them and learning about the childbearing journey from the woman’s perspective. So this is a very important part of our course and is what makes it unique and different from many other disciplines in health. And all Bachelor of Midwifery courses across the country incorporate these continuity of care experiences. It’s a requirement for you to graduate. It does mean that you will be on call. You may get a call at three AM to come and support the woman you’ve developed a relationship with during her labour. So this is an important thing to consider when you’re deciding whether or not to apply for the course.
Deborah: So subjects focus on all kinds of different aspects of care. For example, we have our core clinical subjects every semester, but we also have subjects about women’s trans, Women’s and families transition to parenthood. We we teach you about translating research and best evidence into practice. You will learn about perinatal mental health. You will learn about caring for vulnerable populations and diverse populations and many other very interesting topics. So it’s it’s a rich and diverse curriculum.
Deborah: In first and second year. You’ll typically spend three or four days per week on campus or on a virtual timetabled classes. So you will from the middle of first year, also perhaps have one day of clinical practice a week where you go into a clinic and recruit some of your content continuity of care experiences. Moving into third year, it changes quite a bit in practice and you come into university for about a week every month and have intensive classes. And after that week, you then go back out into the clinical environment again.
Deborah: So these are some of the things that are involved in studying midwifery, as I mentioned, we have wonderful clinical practice laboratories where there’s hands-on learning in a simulated setting. We have a classroom and a small group and large group learning, which is designed to be interactive and collaborative. We tend not to give long lectures. We tend to give you reading and recorded lectures, which then in class, we we do a lot of interactive work around. So preparation is important. So that independent study is often set before the class. It’s what we call flipped learning. So you do your preparation and then in class, you’re expected to contribute to discussions and activities around that.
Deborah: You will develop a professional portfolio throughout the course, which will be a record of your skills and artifacts you collect along the way and reflections on your experiences.
Deborah: So the hospital and clinical placements, they’re not all in hospitals. Both block placements and also the continuity of care experiences, as I mentioned before, where you meet with the woman, attend her appointments during pregnancy, you’re on call for her labour and birth and you attend to support her for that and you visit her and attend her appointments after the birth. And you will recruit a minimum of 20 women over the three-year course. We have lots of different forms of test of assessment that integrates theory and practice, including essays and case studies, reflections, group presentations, exams. We have simulated practice assessments as well. They’re called Oskies. And you are also assessed on placement using a national framework called the AMSAT.
Deborah: So UTS is a wonderful campus. It’s right in the city and full of wonderful resources. So you will have state of the art clinical facilities, as you can see in this slide. There are the typical hospital nursing style facilities for examination of patients who have medical concerns. We also have all these specific midwifery equipment for simulation and especially a birthing simulation suite that includes all the important active birth and natural birth equipment that we need to learn how to use, including water immersion and upright positioning. So you get to learn and practice your skills in a very safe environment, experimental environment before you go out into the clinical environment working with women. And when you are in the clinical environment working with women, you are always under supervision of a registered midwife.
Deborah: We have lots of wonderful mannequins that do all kinds of wonderful things, we had mannequins that have have a pulse. They have a baby in their belly and you can give them injections, you can give them an I.V. drip. We have all sorts of wonderful equipment for you to play with, as well as for the babies. So there is a subject called Care of the Newborn, where you will learn all the essential skills of emergency care and other care that you need to learn about and to support women to care for their babies. So not all the learning is in labs. We also have tutorials in classrooms and workshop rooms as well, of course.
Deborah: We’re right in the heart of Sydney. It’s less than 10-minute walk from Central Station, so it’s very easy for everybody to get to. We have lots of busses that arrive there, too. And our lab classes are in Building 10, which is in Jones Street, right near the library. The new building, UTS Central and opposite alumni green. So it’s a lovely, lovely spot.
Deborah: Typical placements in hospitals. Morning shifts start at 7:00 a.m. and evening shifts start in the afternoon after lunch and end at 10:00 p.m. typically, and shift links can vary. We have many students doing 12 hour shifts, but many of them are eight hour shifts. And in addition, you’re on call for births during the day, during the night and on weekends. So you need to be prepared to be available for that. And for the continuity of care appointments with women, which can happen at any time.
Deborah: So you be placed in all areas of midwifery practice so that you learn to obtain the full scope of practice if the midwife. And that includes antenatal, which is pregnancy care, post-natal which is care after the birth, birthing suite where women labour and give birth or birthing centre, special care nursery, where premature and unwell babies are looked after. Operating theatres where women may have a caesarean section or a post birth procedure in the community, in women’s homes and community health centres, in Aboriginal health centres, midwifery group practice, either within or outside a hospital setting where you will work alongside midwives who work in a totally continuity of care model, where they follow women through and work with women alongside women throughout their pregnancy, birth and postnatal period and birth centres, which are midwifery led and focused on a normal physiological processes.
Deborah: And we have we work closely with the midwifery educators and privately practicing midwives and community health practitioners who teach and assess you in the practice setting. So you will be assigned a home hospital for your three year degree, but you won’t necessarily have every placement in that home hospital. And we have a we have agree agreements with a range of hospitals and placement partners, including those that you can see listed here. And in second and third, you have an additional rural and remote practice option, which you can take during the year in place of your home hospital hours.
Deborah: UTS has a lot of resources available to support you and the students from all the other disciplines. And we you would be, as a midwifery student, part of the School of Nursing and Midwifery, which is housed in the Faculty of Health. And the UTS more broadly provides many supports for you. So there is a student centre which includes access to GPs and counsellors and other sorts of supports for you. We have a very important department called HELPS the higher education language and presentation support where you can go for a small group or one to one support sessions and to help you with your academic writing. And we have an online timetable planner to help you schedule your classes each session. UTS online is an important platform, which is part of your learning whether or not your subject is taught face to face or in a blended mode or completely online via virtual classes. We have, we use the platform canvas for the all the resources and assessment items that you need to do for each subject. So you have a canvas site for each of your subjects throughout the course. We have an absolutely wonderful library in the new building, UTS Central, which is a wonderful place to visit, but also the online library is rich and wonderful place to visit. Full of full of wonderful resources. And as a student, you will have full access to all the important peer reviewed journals to use for your study, as well as a lot of audio-visual resources which are only available to university students. And we have a careers department, and the careers department becomes very important to our third-year students. They become involved in helping prepare you for writing your résumé, writing your application for a graduate position and also your interviews. And in third year one of our assessments is actually a mock interview, which we set up exactly as you would experience in your job interview with a hospital for a graduate position. And we also provide practice labs for students who would like to do make up times and that can be organized with the subject coordinator.
Deborah: So what does a UTS midwifery graduate look like? These are what we call midwifery graduate attributes, and I’d like to just explain each one, as I said earlier. We practice woman centred care, and that is the basis of the philosophy of our course. We also create graduates who are professionally competent, midwives who provide safe and effective care using intelligent kindness. We also work collaboratively to provide excellence in care for all women. We are resilient and emotionally competent midwives who foster human flourishing and socially responsible citizens who value the diversity of people.
Deborah: Our graduates are professionally engaged, critical thinkers who take a lively and questioning approach and embrace lifelong learning. And our and all our health graduates demonstrate professional cultural competency, which contributes to the health and wellbeing of indigenous Australians. Inclusive of physical, social, emotional and spiritual awareness. So we’re very proud of our graduates. We get goose bumps every year when we see our students who come in a very, very enthusiastic and keen, eager to learn and watch them grow and mature into wonderful women Midwives by the end of the course.
Deborah: Many, many careers involved in midwifery, it’s not just going into a hospital to become a midwife, working shifts. As a registered midwife, you can work as a clinical midwife specialist, clinical midwife educator, midwife educator, unit manager, clinical midwifery consultant, practitioner, midwifery manager. You can work in rural and remote settings in Australia and also internationally. You can work as a privately practicing midwife, as an academic researcher, consultant, policy maker. Some of our students go to work in low-income settings, either during their study or later after graduating. Some of our graduates work in the World Health Organization and in Federal and State Health Department, such as the AIHW, and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and New South Wales Health the Ministry of Health. We also have graduates working in the Australian College of Midwives and the International Confederation of Midwives. And many of our students and most of our staff are actively involved in the Australian College of Midwives, which is our peak professional body for midwifery.
Deborah: So how do I reply? Well, you 12 school leavers and those who’ve had a gap year, so school leavers from last year are assessed solely on your selection rank and the selection rank is your ATAR plus any points you qualify for through a UTS Admissions scheme or bonus points based on your performance in particular subjects? None recent school leavers or mature age students compete for a place based on academic merit from previous qualifications. So applicants 20 years of age or over at the time of applying can also opt to seek a special tertiary admissions test known as a STAT that’s optional but it may strengthen your application. So you can find detailed information on admission criteria at the UTS website but all applications are processed through UAC. That is whether or not you’ve recently left school. All applications go through you UAC and a processed there.
Deborah: So we’re now going to answer your questions one. One person has asked. I was wondering if there are any prerequisites for this course. Annabel, would you like to answer that, please?
Annabel: So I’m assuming you mean prerequisites in terms of its subjects at school, is that, I would imagine that would be the case. There is no set prerequisites. However, some subjects do help with the points getting through to you an application process, and they can be found on the UTS website. The thing if you’re thinking about subjects that may in terms of getting through your educational studies at UTS. Some students have found that doing biology or doing something like in AIN Tafe kind of subjects in years 11 and 12 were helpful for those initial years as a student however you don’t have to have a previous study in biology to be successful at this midwifery course. I hope I’ve answered or touched upon your question.
Deborah: Thank you, Bel. Annabel we affectionately call Bel. Bel, would you like to talk a little bit about what the students learn in their very first session in the new curriculum?
Annabel Oh, first year is so much fun. First year is really exciting because it’s just you open your eyes and you see this whole new world in front of you that you may never have even known before, which is midwifery and helping women through pregnancy and birth. And so what these subjects in the first session we call semesters at UTS, we call them sessions. So they’re divided for you guys into a couple of sessions. So autumn sessions the first session. And what we learned is anatomy and physiology, and that’s anatomy and physiology about just the normal human body and how it is impacted by pregnancy, labour and birth. We also learn about the first clinical subjects, midwifery practice one and midwifery practice two, where we learn about the fundamental skills of being safe in clinical care, being safe in a hospital, and learning about how babies grow and how babies are born. And what we do is midwives to help facilitate a baby being born. We also learn about what it’s like to be pregnant. What it’s like to be a new parent there’s a wonderful subject called Transitions to Parenthood. And we learn about the enormity and the emotional concept of being a new parent. And we also learn a beautiful research subject, which helps us learn how to read research and to understand how research is utilized in clinical placement to better women’s experiences and to improve outcomes. You can take me down to I love first year.
Deborah: Thank you, Bel. That was wonderful. And now I’m going to invite Katie to join me in this next question, which is when do placement start clinical placement start? Well, in our new curriculum, which starts next year, as I said, we’re going to aim to get students out into clinical practice just for a bit of observation as early as possible. So as early as week three. But, Katie, I’m going to ask you to talk to the students about the processes of getting vaccinated and getting prepared for placement. It’s extremely important that you all get on to this as early as possible. Katie, would you like to just summarize what the students need to do before they can attend hospital?
Katie: Yeah, no problem. First of all, I would just stress that once you’ve enrolled and had your offer, that you’ve accepted your offer into the course, you will start to get emails coming through asking you to provide us with compliance documentation. So this is documentation that New South Wales Health have to sign before you go on clinical. So you need to really keep an eye on those emails as they come in and action them with whatever is within the email. Now, the types of things that you will have to get are a police check. Now, these checks are valid for five years. So, yeah, so please check. You don’t need a working with children check for this course. You will need, you will get, you will be provided with a vaccination record card, so things like a DTPA, which is the which is valid for 10 years. Sorry I won’t go through all the details on this. But Hepatitis B, mumps, measles, rubella, varicella, that type of thing, that will all be documented either on a vaccination card or you can actually get that from the MyGov of your MyGov account Medicare immunization register. But we will obviously let you know all about that. This will also include the flu shot and it will include the Covid vaccine. And there are a few other documents that need to be submitted as well. And again, you’ll get emails about all this and how you go about doing that. But then your package of documentation is sent through to New South Wales Health, who will verify you and check that everything is in order. And New South Wales health, as do the private hospitals, have a website that looks after student placements and student profiles. So obviously it’s all confidential. But they will then log off what you’ve what you’ve supplied and get you ready for becoming compliant in order to go on clinical. I have to stress, this part of the course is extremely important and it’s very important to get that happening early, because once it’s sorted, then you can enjoy the rest of the course, the theory, the clinical. And it’s not a problem, but I’m obviously there to help you. I’m part of the clinical practice unit team based in Building 10 Faculty of Health normally or by phone or email. And we’re obviously there to help you with all this this information as it gets rolled out.
Deborah: Thank you so much, Katie. Yes. And I think Katie’s emphasized a very important point. When you enrol in the Bachelor of Midwifery, as in other health courses as well, you are enrolling in a professional degree. So there are professional requirements from day one. And if you don’t adhere to those requirements, things like vaccinations and police checks and so forth, you actually can’t start your clinical placement. So, for example, you may have read that all health professionals are required to have two doses of the Covid vaccine by the end of November, and that applies to students as well. So one thing you can do if you’re keen to enrol in a health course is get yourself vaccinated as soon as possible. I’m going to turn to Jacqui now. Jacqueline, is there something you wish you knew before taking the course? If you’ve got some advice for people to a bit of a heads up?
Jacqueline: Yeah, so probably a few things. You need to be organized, like Katie said, one being organized with your vaccinations and that side of things. But I think the course is full time. It takes a lot of your time, but not always I’m not meaning that in a bad way. It just becomes consuming because you’ve become so passionate about everything, but I guess being organized in terms of knowing when your assignments are due. Knowing when you’re on placement and being organized around that and coordinating whatever other aspects of your life may impact that and being organized with your continuity of care experiences. I think there’s strategic ways in which well, there’s ways in which you can be strategic about your continuity of care in terms of thinking about when they’re due to having them do around a similar time. So that your on call, lets say maybe in September only, and you’ve got the rest of the year where you’re not on call and all you’ve got is appointments and other placement. And I guess probably the other thing was I didn’t realize how passionate I would become about women’s health and providing women centered care. Yeah, like the continuity of care experience are just the best part of the degree. I think you get to form these relationships with women and support them throughout their pregnancy. You get to support them through their birth and then see them post-natally becoming parents and it’s just amazing. I will say it can be hard being on call. I got a call at one 30 this morning and I helped a baby come into this world at four 01 this morning. So, yay, that’s my second last one. So I’m excited about that. But yeah, it’s I think the main thing is probably just to be organized, you know, having a really good support system around you, whether that be your family, some friends and you know, the peers that you will come into contact with, they are your support network and just knowing that they’re there for you. So, yeah.
Deborah: Thank you very much, Jac, and how have you found doing the course with the young children?
Jacqueline: Look, I think if you’d asked me that in my first week of uni or even before I started, I would have been petrified and thought, oh, my gosh, how am I possibly going to manage this? But here I am now, I don’t know, eight weeks out from finishing. And it’s been like it’s been completely manageable. It’s, you know, yes, it’s hard work, but I kind of liken it. I have young kids and that’s my that’s my situation, you know. The recent school leavers, they’ve probably got a part time job or, you know, everybody has their thing that keeps them busy. So I think if you just know your situation and know how you can manage it, that that’s what got me through anyway. I don’t know if that’s very good advice, but, you know, the organization side of things for me was just. That had to be it.
Deborah: Thank you so much, Jac. We need to wrap up soon so we can take one more question or perhaps a comment from our professor, Kathleen Baird.
Kathleen: Thank you. Thank you, Deb. Look, I again, just want to thank everyone who’s taking time out to join us on our virtual open day. Um a big thank you to the panellists who answered all of the questions superbly. I always say that midwifery is an absolute passion. I think it’s really clear to see this morning how many passionate people are on this panel. We absolutely love what we do. And that’s shines through. Midwifery is one just to me, the best profession ever. Like Deb, I came into midwifery late and like Jac I was an accountant before. So how funny is that? That maybe there’s something in that? It was a best decision I ever made in my life. I was mid-thirties and yes, people wondered if I had I don’t know how to was having an early midlife crisis to want to become a student from day one. I felt this was the right thing for me. So I just want to say don’t be too scared. It’s it can be daunting when you’re thinking about starting a new career. But yes. Best thing. Best thing you can do.
Deborah: Thank you very much. Thank you, Kathleen. And I think there’s one last question which Loretta is addressing via the text, so that’s wonderful. Thank you all to our panellists. Thank you to marketing for your support today. And thank you, most importantly to those of you who attended.
Deborah: So there are other opportunities to talk to midwifery students and student admissions and lots more people until three o’clock today and also on Tuesday from four till seven. So please take advantage of that if you’ve got more questions. And you may also like to attend the information sessions for nursing, health, science and sport and exercise science and the creative, intelligent innovation courses later today. And we hope to see some of you next year. Thank you all. Bye bye.