Emeritus Professor Judith Parker
I undertook my basic nursing training at the Melbourne School of Nursing, which prefigured the shift to College/University based nursing education in a number of important ways. In this visionary and, sadly, short lived experiment in nursing education, we “belonged” to the School rather than to a specific training hospital and undertook our clinical placements at a number of affiliated hospitals. While we were paid employees rather than supernumerary students, our Dean and nursing educators wanted to ensure that through our exposure to the differing cultures, rituals and conventional nursing practices of the participating hospitals, we truly understood the importance of drawing upon principles rather than habitual routines in our nursing care.
I worked as an RN at Royal Melbourne Hospital for a few years, and later, with four small children, I worked part-time in a number of clinical settings. I wanted to gain a more coherent understanding of the vulnerability and suffering I had encountered in nursing and I enrolled part-time in an Arts degree at Monash in 1969. I was continuously enrolled at Monash for over ten years, undertaking an honours degree and a PhD which was on the topic of the structural, cultural and individual impact of a terminal cancer diagnosis upon patients.
By the time I was appointed as a lecturer at Lincoln Institute of Health Sciences (LIHS) in 1979, I was one of only five PhD prepared nurses in the country and soon after this, hospital-based nursing education was transferred to Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs). The CAE’s focused particularly on teaching and when LIHS amalgamated with La Trobe University, I was in a position to start developing a research agenda for nursing at the university. I applied for a travelling grant from the Nurses Memorial Centre and was able to examine research developments in nursing internationally. I spent 17 years at Lincoln/LaTrobe before I was invited to take up the position of Foundation Head and Chair of the School of Nursing at the University of Melbourne where we focused on interdisciplinary clinical research and education for advanced specialty nursing practice.
I was honoured over my career to be placed on the inaugural Victorian Honour Roll of Women, to receive an Order of Australia (AM) and, upon leaving The University of Melbourne, to receive the title of Emeritus Professor. I believe my greatest contributions have been in my focus of advanced practice, in my writings about nursing and in my mentorship of nurses, many of whom now hold leadership posts in Australia and internationally.
I entered nursing at a time when there were fewer opportunities for women and was swept along on the wave of innovations in higher education which opened up new worlds for women generally and for nurses specifically. Now is another time of huge change where nurses can play key policy, practice, research and teaching roles in this era of new and emerging communicable diseases.
I am excited to have been appointed Patron of the ANMC and look forward to supporting another generation of nurses in their clinical and scholarly pursuits.
