Nursing Scholarship Lunch – Advancing Nursing Leadership
The Nursing Scholarship lunch supports an innovative scholarship program for Alfred Health nurses. The event provides a platform for philanthropy, which will help advance nursing education and leadership at Alfred Health for many years to come.
Alfred Health has been committed to nursing education since 1871, developing some of the most influential nurses in the country. Alfred nursing teams engage in innovative approaches to research, leading teams, learning and professional development.
This international travel scholarship is awarded once a year to an emerging nurse leader in clinical practice, research, education or management. It provides nurses from across Alfred Health with an opportunity to travel overseas to learn from world-leading services first-hand. This will in turn allow them to bring back new ideas and concepts to nursing at Alfred Health.
Janet Weir-Phyland, Alfred Heath Executive Director Nursing Services & Chief Nursing Officer, highlighted the impact that the scholarship will have on Alfred nursing more broadly.
“This nursing scholarship is a tremendous opportunity for Alfred Health nurses. The Scholarship recognises endeavour and achievement. It furthers the advancement of professional practice in clinical, education research and management,” she said.
“We believe in investing in leaders of the future. It is an opportunity for nurses to be the difference, to be the leader they want to be, to be the inspiring example to others and to achieve great things.”
The Alfred Health's Nursing Scholarship Lunch raised close to $50,000 to support and develop nurses with a passion for improving health care. Guest speaker ABC's Virginia Trioli was impressive. Her inspiring keynote address about the decisions we each make to create careers of value and authenticity was extremely well received and set a great tone for the event.
The Alfred Foundation would like to extend our thanks to the extraordinary team of Alfred volunteers for their help throughout the day; along with Bank Vic, First State Super and Andrews Clothing who sponsored the event.
The scholarship was awarded at the Nursing Excellence Awards. A number of high quality applications were received and two were awarded to Belinda Bourne and Rebecca Brereton.
Nursing Scholarship recipient Belinda Bourne
The Alfred is the referral centre for all paediatric lung transplant patients from across Australia. Belinda’s project application was to investigate and further develop support for this unique patient group.
Belinda will use the scholarship to travel to meet with experts and exemplars of paediatric transplant in North America. Belinda is particularly keen to explore the way in which we can potentially implement some of these examples at Alfred Health to enhance the compliance rate in adolescent patients posts lung transplant and improve their post-transplant outcomes. She will also further investigate the nurse practitioner role in this process.
Nursing Scholarship recipient Rebecca Brereton
Rebecca’s project application was to support the development and delivery of a patient-centred and Mental Health Nurse practitioner model-of-care, specifically around alcohol and other drugs. By leveraging upon collaborative relationships with specialist across addiction, psychiatry, psychology and infectious diseases, to allow the nurse practitioner role to be able to provide on-site treatment for a range of patient-stated goals in relation to co-occurring addiction and mental health issues.
Rebecca plans to visit Vancouver to further investigate and benchmark well establish progressive integrated models of care already occurring in in Canada and help deliver this integrated best practice care in psychiatric management across Alfred Health.
