Nora Shields is making big changes in health, writes Bridget Fitzgerald
Nora Shields has worked out the perfect way to give her physiotherapist students real-life experience and offer a community service.
Five years ago, the La Trobe University postgraduate co-ordinator decided to create an individualised community-based program teaming up the students with local young people who have a disability.
The pairs go to the gym together and the students act as mentors, co-ordinating an exercise regime.
Shields says it provides students with experience they can’t get in the regular curriculum – as well as a workout. But more importantly, she says, it allows people with a disability to gain the health benefits of engaging in exercise in a social atmosphere.
“As you might expect it’s really hard for any of us to engage in physical exercise and activity these days,” she says. “When you have a disability you have all of those reasons plus others that prevent you from participating.”
Shields believes taking her students’ placements outside of hospital walls adds an extra element to their experience.
“[The students] often only see people when they are very sick; when most people are not sick they are living their lives in the community.”
Shields was a practising physiotherapist in Ireland before she completed her PhD and moved to Australia 10 years ago. Since then, her role within La Trobe’s physiotherapy department has involved her focusing on encouraging people with a disability to take part in exercise and physical activity.
“My work is about understanding barriers to exercise and physical activity, and coming up with models of delivery that might help engage people who have a disability,” Shields says.
Much of her work concerns activity in the local community, so when Northern Health was looking for a professor of clinical and community practice to co-ordinate the partnership between research and medical practice, Shields was the perfect fit.
A few weeks into her new role, Shields says she is getting a sense of the issues that relate to Melbourne’s northern suburbs and has found the region to have quite a high instance of diabetes and obesity.
“The issue of diabetes and being overweight and obesity in the community links in very well with what I do with disability and exercise,” she says.
Shields says there is already a relationship between La Trobe and Northern Health, with allied health students working alongside clinicians as part of a clinical school.
Although still fresh to the role, she is keen to continue building the “strong links and relationship” between the two organisations and co-ordinating community research.
“[My role] will be building up the capacity to do research among the people working at Northern Health,” she says.
“I think La Trobe, with its position in the northern region and its emphasis on social justice, can be a really important part of that partnership.”■
