BACKGROUND

Karen’s perspective: As a researcher evaluating the UONDRH community engagement program, I work in close physical proximity to the community engagement team, including Ian in his role as community engagement program manager and Kelly in her role as academic representative. The openness of our office allows me to hear, and watch Ian, Kelly and others from our UONDRH and community organisations, collaborate to design and organise community engagement activities. I am also aware of constant busyness of the day-to-day activities of the community engagement team that includes numerous phone calls, emails, diary entries, timetables, forms, frequent chats and occasional laughter that occur with others in the office. Not to mention the neat folders, piles of paper and scribbled notes, the footballs lying on the floor, and the colourful notice boards full of smiling healthcare students above their desks. Boxes of resources line the walkway. When there is an activity about to happen these boxes constantly change. Importantly, there is the UONDRH minibus in the car park outside ready to transport healthcare students to a range of venues around our rural community. While team members work with each other, I observe and admire their efforts and abilities to be flexible and innovative as they deal with a range of organisations, people, equipment, funding parameters, protocols and policies.

Together with UONDRH educators, the community engagement program team designs, organises and monitors activities that take account of people from a range of different community sectors and organisations, particularly those where people’s health may be vulnerable due to socioeconomic disadvantage, disability or geographical remoteness. These activities provide students with opportunities to get to know a range of people from different age groups in diverse settings, including local government primary schools, non-government organisations and Aboriginal playgroups. Although students’ participation is largely voluntary, the community engagement team is constantly seeking opportunities to embed relevant professional practice competencies into the activities. Through such activities, students are encouraged to broaden their interpretation of health and healthcare as well as explore the roles they can play in addressing social determinants of health in the community. Identification of relevant professional practice competencies enables some aspects of students’ participation to be assessable and therefore explicitly linked to students’ learning outcomes. In this chapter, we are focusing on those people who collaborate to design, organise and monitor the community activities (in particular, the community engagement team) rather than those who participate in them (these being the healthcare students). It is the responsibility of the community engagement team to make compliance as seamless as possible for the participating organisations and students, and to manage any constraints that will influence the design, implementation and monitoring of activities.