| Communications and Development |  |
Published by Communications and Development
Three UC staff members have received funding to assist professional development initiatives in the latest round of the Vice-Chancellor General Staff Development Awards.
Staff development awards of up to $5000 are available every six months for general staff. They are designed to recognise and assist professional development activities such as further study, visits to other educational institutions, staff exchanges, specialised training or to attend Australasian conferences.
The latest awards were presented to the recipients by Vice-Chancellor Professor Roy Sharp in a special ceremony held late last month on his second-last day in office.
UC Health Centre practice nurse Wendy Risdon’s award will enable her to embark on a four-week study trip to America in late August to gather information on various models of care employed by nurses at 12 different medical facilities, looking at how these could be integrated into the UC Health Centre. She will also attend the 12th Annual Healing Touch International Conference in Milwaukee from 3-7 September.
Healing touch is a hands-on therapy that complements traditional medical care. Since becoming a qualified Healing Touch practitioner in 2007 Mrs Risdon has sought to integrate the energy-based medicine into her nursing practice.
She said it was the second time she had applied for the award and had only done so this time after much encouragement from Health Centre Director Dr Joan Allardyce.
“I’m so pleased I did apply. Getting this is a big thrill,” she said.
“I will be going to facilities that use complementary therapies such as Healing Touch as part of their mainstream care and I’ll ‘shadow’ the nurses that use it.
“I hope to return with lots of information and enthusiasm. Healing Touch is not particularly well-known or used here in New Zealand but I think there is a big role for it. My goal is to incorporate complementary therapies into mainstream medicine.”
Marie Menzies, policy and risk officer in the Planning, Information and Reporting Unit (PIRU) will use her award to attend a week-long training course conducted by the Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief (RedR) at Burnham Military Camp in Christchurch later this month.
The course is directly related to Ms Menzies’ involvement as the administration officer/manager in the University’s Incident Management Team (IMT).
She said she was looking forward to being put through a lot of real-life scenario training and gaining a broad base of knowledge she could put to good use in her emergency management portfolio at UC.
University Centre for Teaching and Learning (UCTL) survey administrator John Ogier received funding to attend the Australasian Higher Education Evaluation Forum at Monash University in Melbourne in October, where he will give a paper on online course surveys run at UC, followed by a scoping visit to Adelaide University where he plans to investigate the collaborative development of an online survey system.
Mr Ogier said his ultimate goal was to use the award “towards developing the best tool and establishing the best systems for getting richer, more timely feedback from our students on their learning".
For further information please contact:
Maria De Cort
Communications Officer
University of Canterbury
Ph: (03) 364 2072
maria.decort@canterbury.ac.nz