NOARLUNGA TAFE AND FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Ms THOMPSON (Reynell) (16:10): Yesterday afternoon, I was very pleased to visit the TAFE Noarlunga campus and celebrate the opening of a Flinders University presence on that campus. It has been my goal, ever since I came to parliament, to have more of a presence of Flinders University out in my southern community. We have had a couple of goes. We had a Flinders University presence at Christies Beach High School for a while. It worked well for a while, but it did not have the ongoing support to sustain it, as there were changes of leadership in both the school and the university.

However, this is a new way of giving the message to young people from the south that they are entitled to go to university. The figures from the last three censuses show that, in my electorate, not nearly enough young people and older people go to university. Unfortunately, they are also showing that their attendance at TAFE is not as strong as it is in the north, for instance, in similar suburbs. This message, down in the atrium at Noarlunga TAFE, that Flinders University is there for them means that people who are using the community library as well as attending TAFE see that university can be part of their aspirations.

There are a number of important links already happening between Flinders University and the south. One of the important ones is their relationship with the South Adelaide Football Club, whereby Flinders is advertised at the ground. It provides physiotherapy students who get work experience on game days, right up to working with the league players. It has had a communications and creative writing student undertaking communication projects at South Adelaide, including interviewing players and staff and writing media releases and newsletters.

The other important project is the Onkaparinga Clinical Educational Program, which is located in its own building just across the road from the GP Plus and Noarlunga Hospital. This is a program whereby third year Flinders medical students, instead of doing their internship in the hospital, come out into the community and are placed not only in Noarlunga Hospital, but with a range of GPs, specialists and services, such as drug and alcohol services, in the south.

This means that these young students are seeing the circumstances where most of them will end up practising medicine. Most of them do not end up in the hospitals, but if you go through the traditional stream, you do not get to find out what happens in a GP surgery. Through the wonderful work of Professor Sarah Mahoney and Linnea Boileau, these young people have opportunities to further their interest in medicine in a real-life situation.

One of the important initiatives of OCEP is to work with Christies Beach High School in the establishment of what is going to be called the Cube. Cube does not actually stand for anything; it was just seen as a name that did not have any derogatory comments and so that students at Christies Beach High School could easily say, 'I'm going over to the Cube'. The details of this are still being worked out.

There are many questions about ethics and appropriate referrals, as well as the role that student doctors can have in dealing with young people in a high school situation. However, the OCEP students have already been working with the Christies students, and last year they held an expo which was about health information where people could ask medical students questions about their mental and physical health and have discussions about wellbeing.

Wirreanda High School is also establishing a wellbeing centre, and they are also looking at working with OCEP to enable young people to have easier access to medical health. This is developing further in that OCEP is now looking at whether they can establish a specialist stream in adolescent health. Given the number of times we hear about the problems that young people in today's community face with the pressures on them with communications technology, this is an initiative to be supported.