David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Tyrrell for bringing this matter of public importance to the Senate, and I support it wholeheartedly. Clinical or practical placements for undergraduate students are integral to consolidating the skills and lessons taught in a formal classroom, but they come at a cost to our students, and that is something that we need to think through, particularly when we're looking across Australia and seeing people with jobs facing the cost-of-living crisis and doing it tough.

It's very rare to see a placement that's a funded position, and quite often the universities can set their minimum hours with only broad guidance from professional bodies. According to the Department of Health and Aged Care, registered nurses require a minimum of 800 hours unpaid clinical placement. The AMA says medical students require 2,760 hours. Trainee physiotherapists require between 700 and 1,000 hours. For teachers it's 600 hours, and for social workers it's 1,000 hours. A thousand hours is about 25 work weeks, essentially half a year of unpaid work. At the minimum wage, that equates to around $22,000 of free labour. Some may and probably will argue that that's just the cost of learning, but I would remind people that students already pay to attend placements through their university fees and other mandatory requirements such as background checks and booster vaccinations. Placements can extend to up to four to eight weeks at a time, and all the while, a student still has to fund their usual cost of living. Some placements can include the requirement to travel vast distances or to live away from home. Many students must live in a location where they don't have access to their regular employer or employers. It's a great deal of stress that we are putting on our future clinicians at a time when they should be focused on their studies.

It has been put to me that clinical placements are already stressful enough and that with these additional strains we are launching our junior clinicians into their careers in states of mental and financial stress. We hear stories of people not actually finishing their studies, due to the financial stress. I reached out to one clinician today to understand their experience. Here is what they had to say: 'During my placement, we were explicitly told not to work. This was because our placements were 40 hours a week for up to eight weeks, so it wouldn't be safe to work outside this. People do, though, and some worked as nursing assistants or enrolled nurses, where they have a duty of care, which I think is dangerous. But you need money to live, so there's no real escaping it. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do eight hours of placement then paid work and then uni work. And we were often used as paid staff, even though we should have been supervised with everything we did. An understaffed unit is of course going to use the extra hands to their advantage rather than focus on the education and development of those students.' That is just one experience, but I'm sure it will ring familiar with many clinicians across the country who have had to weigh their studies with placements with the regular pressures of life and family.

In a cost-of-living crisis, where young people, particularly students, often feel the pinch most acutely, it is time that we looked at this area. Again, I thank Senator Tyrrell for bringing this to the Senate today, and I hope we can continue this conversation on behalf of the future clinicians that we so desperately need in our health and social services systems.