Bid for the top

By Shaun Inguanzo
DENISE Baker is one happy nurse after winning a $10,000 scholarship to study high-level management at the Sydney based College of Nursing.
Ms Baker, who works at the South Eastern Private Hospital in Noble Park, is one of six healthcare professionals around Australia to have won the grant from the MBF Foundation that will pay for a graduate certificate in clinical management at the College of Nursing.
“I am very excited,” she told the Star this week.
“I was going to study anyway but I saw a brochure in the staff dining room and I applied for (the funding).
“The $10,000 will pay for the course, books and any travelling I need to do.”
Ms Baker has been a nurse for almost 20 years and has worked in emergency wards in several hospitals including The Alfred hospital.
She is now in a management role at South Eastern Private Hospital and is hoping her course will qualify her for the role of Director of Nursing. Ms Baker said she would do the course by distance education as she also helped care for her two children, one aged six and the other 12.
“I love studying, I’d be a full-time student if someone paid me to do it,” she said with a laugh.
“It’s my goal to be Director of Nursing.”
Ms Baker has, until now, kept a lid on her achievement.
“I haven’t told a lot of people – I don’t like to blow my own trumpet,” she said.
MBF chief medical officer and chairwoman of the MBF Foundation steering committee Dr Christine Bennett said the scholarship program provides valuable education opportunities that can help hospitals retain talented nurses amid a chronic shortage of health professionals.
“Nurses are the lifeblood of the hospital system but they can miss out on furthering their nursing studies because of the costs associated with undertaking relevant extension courses,” Dr Bennett said.
“The MBF Foundation program extends knowledge and skills, enhances career paths and gives communities access to higher qualified nurses who are able to share what they have learned with colleagues, in the process improving overall standards of care.”