Scholarships & awards

Person-Centred Value Based Health Care (PCVBHC) study tour in the United Kingdom

Jenny is the newly appointed Project Lead for the PCVBHC project at RMH; the goal of this project is to implement a digital platform called Personalising Care, Empowering People (PerEmpo). PerEmpo is a person-centred values-based health care framework which allows patients, together with their clinicians, to capture their values, goals and preferences. The tool then tracks and measures the patient’s ability to live according to their individual values, goals and preferences and what impact the patients’ medical issues and treatment have on this ability.

The PCVBHC project aims to:

• positively impact the experiences of patients, consumers and carers
• reduce inequity in care delivery
• optimise clinical teams’ delivery of care
• provide an environment that improves therapeutic relationships and health outcomes, and
• enhance communication between patients and healthcare teams about their values and what matters to them. 

Jenny will use the Jane Bell Scholarship monies to help fund a study tour in the UK and Wales where she will visit 4 healthcare services that have successfully integrated the PerEmpo platform in different clinical contexts. She wants to learn what key elements led to their success, how they evaluate and assess the program and what leadership approaches were effective during implementation. She will also meet with key personnel from the company that designed PerEmpo to further enhance the knowledge gained from the hospital tours.  

Photo below on the left

Master of Clinical Psychology

Michelle has a long career in oncology nursing and has seen firsthand how critical the relationship is between psychological support and patient outcomes, especially for people living with cancer. This has led to her becoming a strong advocate for comprehensive care strategies that address both the physical and emotional challenges faced by patients and their families. 

Reflecting this ethos in her own practice, Michelle has committed to improving her psychological support expertise so the care she provides is more holistic and responsive to all the patient’s needs. 

She will use the Jane Bell Scholarship to help her complete a Master of Clinical Psychology with the aim of applying the knowledge and skills from her studies to her own practice and to encourage other clinicians in her clinical area to also prioritise the management of the mental health concerns of the patients in their care. 

Note: Waiting on an photo of Michelle to replace the 'hello' image below!

Completion of a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Julie is an RMH graduate and was continuously employed at the RMH for over 40 years, most recently as a nurse educator, and is a committed transformational teacher and leader. After her own challenging transition into the nurse educator role,  Julie is passionate about mentoring and coaching new educators, students and graduates so their transitions were more positive and rewarding than her own.  

This passion led to Julie completing a Master of Clinical Education which culminated in a published paper —'The transition of clinical nurses to nurse educator roles – a scoping review’—that found most new nurse educators experience a transition that is challenging, difficult and isolating due to a lack of preparation, ineffective orientation processes, little or no mentoring and no ongoing support. 

Julie wants to follow up her scoping review with a mixed method study that investigates the transition of clinical nurses into clinical nurse educators’ roles in Australian hospitals. Her ultimate aim is to publish a paper that prompts employers to better support their new nurse educators, increase awareness of transition shock, encourage educator peers to mentor and coach new colleagues and provide new nurse educators with the information they need to self-advocate. 

The Jane Bell Scholarship will assist Julie in completing this research as part of her PhD. 

Photo below on the right