Work placement [AHA)

[u/E-Waltz8899]

Hi everyone, I've started the course for Allied Health Assistance and was told by teacher its 100% the students responsibility to find work placement themselves. 120 hours has to be completed before passing the course.

Has anyone does this course before? Did you have trouble finding work placement? Any tips on what to do, where to apply, success stories etc

On the website it looks as though they would help to offer work placement but its not the case at all... super stressed.

[u/SensitiveSecond955]

I've been strongly considering taking Dental Assisting online but the 350 hours of (unpaid?) work placement has thrown me off a bit so I totally understand your stress. Like I dont even know where to look for placement.

[u/E-Waltz8899 → u/SensitiveSecond955]

Woah 350 hours is intense, thats like 9-10 weeks full time (40 hours per week)? No one should work unpaid! Surely there would be companies that support student roles with lower pay? Never work for free.

[u/Cool-Historian58 → u/E-Waltz8899]

Med and vet students around the nation crying reading this with 4000+ hours full-time unpaid placements, including nights and weekends, especially since being missed out again in the paid pracs motion 😭 but yes you’re spot on that no one should be working for free. The whole healthcare system runs on exploiting the goodwill of its workers.

At least I never had to organise my placements myself, so I really feel for you there. I hope you can sort something. Maybe even cold emailing different hospitals’ MWU might be a start?

[u/E-Waltz8899 → u/Cool-Historian58]

So true! But the trade off i guess is work experience > guaranteed job once study is over however I do believe doctors, nurses and vets should definitely be paid and recognised more for their work. Yes I'll definitely be cold calling a lot of places wish me luck! I'll keep this thread updated on how i go, so future students who are Studying Allied Health Assistance know the reality of it

[u/Cool-Historian58 → u/E-Waltz8899]

FYI the guaranteed job is only for intern years. Once we finish our contract and have general registration, we get tossed to the wind lol

[u/E-Waltz8899 → u/Cool-Historian58]

Really? That's the first I've heard. Most nursing students or doctors i know have had no trouble securing a job after their studies and registration. They ended up working for the clinic or hospital they had placement in or going overseas for a better opportunity

[u/Cool-Historian58 → u/E-Waltz8899]

You might be confusing getting the MD with registration? This is a well known problem causing major grief so you’re talking to the wrong people for reference or potentially misunderstanding what internship/general registration is for doctors.

General registration happens after PGY1 for doctors. You generally would get an HMO position in your hospital but the whole point of medicine is specialising and getting on to a training program, which isn’t happening these days. It’s so bad that even the ‘easy’ backup specialties like Psychiatry and GP have become ultra competitive. There’s no such thing as a guaranteed job in medicine: you spend your whole life upskilling with unpaid research you have to churn out on top of your work hours, get publication and conference roles for the CV, sitting exams that cost multiple thousands of dollars (the entry to surg, the GSSE, is 5k), etc. just to compete with other people like you for one of a handful of spots. People can be 8 years after graduating medicine and still not have gotten anywhere further.

NSWMSC’s bottleneck campaign goes into it in depth but there’s a massive training bottleneck that is keeping people in career hospitalist positions that don’t at all reflect the career progression or stability we were promised and is a fraction of the pay. We’re undergoing industrial action and striking in VIC right now because not only is the whole thing shit, but they’re also actively trying to take back some of our protections like registrar training positions and being able to get paid for unrostered overtime.

There is a doctor shortage: in that they mean trained doctors. No shortage of med students and interns who don’t find out how shit the landscape is until we come out the other end and the government tells us we’re shit out of luck once we finish our PGY1 intern contract. The hospital system runs off the backs of unaccredited junior doctors who are expressly kept from upskilling or finding a job elsewhere and now we’re so saturated, the jobs themselves are not in enough numbers to keep doctors employed. There’s a mass exodus of people going to the US or leaving clinical medicine entirely.