Podiatry

Malia:

Hi I’m Dr Malia Ho and I am the Head of Course for Podiatry Practice in CQUniversity.

All our lecturers were practicing clinicians before they came into academia. So for example myself, I’ve been working as a podiatrist for about 20 years before I started working as a lecturer and with my other colleagues as well, all of them between 10 to 15 years of clinical practice.

I think the students really enjoy the clinical placement component of the course. It is very realistic because we do have a clinic within the university and students see real patients in the clinic and they treat real patients as well.

So as part of the course students would have at least 1000 hours in clinical placement. So in second year there will be a lot of guidance so they’ll be seeing cases that aren’t so complicated and supervised by a clinical supervisor. As they go on to the third and fourth year they will be seeing more and more complicated cases and there’s also, there's not just an internal clinical placement component, there is an external clinical component as well where students will have to travel, basically potentially all over Australia. So they could have external placements within Queensland itself but also other states such as New South Wales, Tasmania and some of our students are also go to metro areas like Sydney and Melbourne and they also have placements in rural regional areas such as Mount Isa and Cook Town.

So the course is fully accredited by the Podiatry Accreditation Board of Australia. So students who qualify are able to register with Ahpra and work as a podiatrist straight away, so there is no bridging component at all.

In terms of industry experts , for our podiatry surgery unit  we have a podiatry surgeon who comes in to teach the lectures as well as conduct all the practicals. In terms of our advance pharmacology as well, we have a pharmacologist as well as a podiatrist with endorse, who has endorsement for medicines. So this person comes in to teach advanced pharmacology.

Jeremy:

I like podiatry because you can have them leave the clinic better than when they came in and help them get around their day to day life.

Katie:

I like studying at CQUniversity because we have really small class sizes which means we get a lot of face to face time with the lecturers and it really helps with learning.