2023 WA Rural Health Excellence Awards -Rural Researcher or Educator Award

Congratulations to the finalists for the 2023 WA Rural Health Excellence Awards – Allied Health Professional of the Year Award

• Bronwyn Peirce The Rural Clinical School of WA and WA Country Health Service?Bunbury
• Kathryn Fitzgerald WA Centre for Rural Health – Geraldton??
• Associate Professor Michele Gawlinski The Rural Clinical School of WA

Bronwyn Peirce The Rural Clinical School of WA?

Originally from Queensland, Dr Bronwyn Peirce pursued her passion for emergency medicine achieving fellowship with the Australian College for Emergency Medicine in 2000.

Bron has worked as a consultant emergency physician in Brisbane, Darwin and Bunbury, including as Director of Emergency Medicine Training for ACEM in Darwin and Bunbury.

In addition to her clinical role with WA Country Health Service, Bron is involved in the education of medical students at The Rural Clinical School of WA.

Bron plays an integral role with RCSWA, serving as Bunbury Lead Medical coordinator, Final Year Coordinator and Academic Lead for the Regional Training Hubs Program.

Bron is renowned for providing high-quality small group teaching and has led the charge to establish a permanent presence of Medical Education Registrars at Bunbury Hospital.

In her twenty years of work in Bunbury, Bron has shown outstanding leadership in strengthening country WA’s workforce, while being an advocate for improved rural training for medical practitioners.

Kathryn Fitzgerald WA Centre for Rural Health – Geraldton?

Kathryn has worked as an allied health professional in rural Western Australia for 35 years across speech pathology practice in public and private sectors and rural health policy.

Over the past decade, she has worked as an education academic at the WA Centre for Rural Health (WACRH), developing rural workforce programs centring on clinical placements for allied health students.

Kathryn ensures students are work ready for rural practice through excellent clinical placement experiences based on authentic community and cultural connection coupled with scholarly teaching and learning approaches. Her approach has transformed clinical education programs in the Midwest and beyond.

She has developed new clinical placement models for allied health students in Mount Magnet and Carnarvon. She has designed and developed integrated rural speech pathology placements that are semester and year-long, the only program of its kind in Australia.

She is committed to working with rural high school students on a health careers program delivered in experiential and simulated learning environments. Several hundred rural high school students have participated in the Student Health Academy over the last nine years.

Kathryn shares her knowledge and passion for rural health education with others, developing and sharing resources and programs for peer-assisted learning, methods of supervision and feedback, simulated learning programs, facilitating clinical reasoning and delivering professional development for clinical supervisors.

She is continuing to develop her learning in health professional education and research by undertaking a Doctor of Education program with her research focusing on how students learn and apply clinical reasoning while on clinical placements.

Associate Professor Michele Gawlinski The Rural Clinical School of WA – (UWA Nedlands)?

Associate Professor Michele Gawlinski has dedicated more than two decades of her academic career to developing education content for medical students at both The University of Western Australia and Notre Dame University Australia.

After working in regional Queensland and Moora in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region, and completing her Master of Educational Management, Michele began her work at The Rural Clinical School of WA in 2010.

Her work in curriculum development and governance has seen the continued success of RCSWA’s medical student program. The establishment of their final year student program in 2019 has been an important pipeline of rural intern doctors for WA Country Health Service throughout rural WA.

Michele’s early career started in rural general practice but she was soon approached to help establish UWA’s Medical Education Unit. While there she was the educational designer behind the Teaching on the Run program. More recently Michele developed the ‘Whisper No More’ course for the WA Centre for Rural Health to help improve cancer outcomes for Aboriginal patients.

Michele’s work is proof that student advocacy and curriculum development can contribute to real creation of rural generalist jobs and the development of a strong, stable rural medical workforce.