The Engine of The New New Zealand

Health and well-being

Over-population, food shortages and climate change - they're presenting new challenges almost daily to how the world can get healthy, and stay that way.

Health and well-being is a broad area of study, but at its heart is the prevention, treatment and management of disability, illness or disease.

It's about developing new approaches to health that are applicable in a constantly-changing world.

Find out more about rehabilitation studies, speech and language therapy, the work of the sleep/wake centre, health science and nursing.

Health science

Help people get healthy – and stay that way.

In New Zealand and all over the world, it’s vital that we develop an increased focus on health, wellness, disease prevention, and understanding the impact the environment has on community health. Health Science uses knowledge from several areas to understand health, health care, and health services.

Health Science is a huge field with multiple areas of interest you can specialise in, leading to a broad palette of possible careers. It’s a field that’s only going to get more important as our population ages – the longer we live the greater the need for people to help us stay healthy. Some of the different areas within Health Science include:

Māori Health Science

Understanding the impact of science and the social sciences on Māori health can give you the knowledge and confidence to address health issues from a Māori perspective.

Psychology

Timely psychological interventions can enhance the health of individuals, communities, and organisations. With an understanding of human behaviour, you can address individual, family, community, and organisational mental health issues and the things that cause these issues. Check out our Area of Interest page on psychology to find out more.

Rehabilitation

Health professionals working in rehabilitation assess the needs of people with physical, sensory, age or health-related disabilities. These psychiatric, intellectual, and/or social disabilities may include alcohol and drug abuse.

Sport and Exercise

Cardiologists, physiotherapists, and orthopaedic surgeons are teaming up with clinical exercise prescription therapists worldwide to optimise the rehabilitation process of post-surgical patients as part of the trend toward integrated health care.

Find out more about careers in this area and how you can do it too.

Nursing

You might not find one who’ll admit it, but doctors wouldn’t last five minutes without nurses.

They combine the fine art of caring with scientific skills and knowledge. Nurses perform treatments and procedures as prescribed by physicians and nurse practitioners. But they don’t just care for the sick and infirm – they also educate patients in the issues of healthy living and wellness.

Today’s nurses are more knowledgeable and skilled than ever before, well-trained in how the human body functions both when it’s healthy and when it’s not. They are the front line in New Zealand’s health care, often using their analytical skills to assess and monitor patient health well before a doctor gets involved.

Find out more about careers in this area, and how you can do it too.

Public Health

Have you ever wanted to find ways to save lives? Or find a way to prolong the lives of humans riddled with cancer, prevent diseases among our ageing population or improve housing conditions to increase health and wellbeing?

If you have, then a career in Public Health could be for you.

Kronic, party pills and legal highs.

We’ve all heard about them but do we really know how harmful they are?

Massey public health researchers are studying these new drug trends and informing the Government on whether they are detrimental to the health of New Zealanders.

We are also researching obesity within New Zealand children and coming up with ways to make streets and neighbourhoods safer and more attractive places for children to play.

Public Health is about creating better lives for populations of people; it’s about saving and prolonging lives, promoting wellness and preventing disease.

Find out more about careers in Public Health and how to get there too.

Rehabilitation Studies

Rehabilitation: Restoring (someone) to health or normal life by training and therapy after imprisonment, addiction, or illness (Oxford Dictionary)

“Rehabilitation focuses on rebuilding self-confidence and self-belief as much as it does with developing adaptive skills to restore function,” says Steve La Grow, Massey professor and rehabilitation expert. “This is about rebuilding your self-confidence following the onset of a significant disability.”

It’s the ‘normal life’ part that Steve is most concerned with.

“When the population was younger, all of our interest in rehabilitation was around work and independence,” he says, but “now as the population is aging, the emphasis is more on those factors which enhance quality of life.This is more subtle and requires study.”

Which is exactly was Professor La Grow has been doing for the last several years; trying to figure out how mobility impacts on quality of life.

“My most current research verifies that even though there is a direct relationship between the ability to get around and quality of life, there’s even a bigger relationship between ability to get around and one’s sense of emotional/social wellbeing. Those two together have the biggest impact on quality of life.”

So rehabilitation is as much a way of thinking as it is a process of doing.

Rehabilitation professionals are first and foremost problem solvers. They often start working with people at the point that the medical profession is saying that there is nothing more that can be done. While that may be true medically or surgically, it certainly isn’t true adaptively.

Generally, in rehabilitation you address the gap between the environmental or physical demands of performing a task and a person’s ability. Rehab is about trying to bridge that gap by changing the task, the environment in which the task is performed or the abilities of the person performing it.

Often you will need to find new ways of doing things, or if the person simply cannot perform the task at hand, ways of getting around the barriers that that would pose.

Find out about careers in rehabilitation and how you can do it too.

Sleep/Wake Centre

From their small centre in Wellington, the Sleep/Wake Centre is the leading provider of sleep health and safety research for some of the world’s major airlines.

Staff and students are doing ground-breaking work in sleep deprivation among doctors, and on healthy sleep across the lifespan, for instance sleep in pregnancy and in those with Alzheimers.

Established in 1998, the Sleep/Wake Research Centre has an international reputation for the quality of its work – and they have the accolades for their work and research to back that up.

With partners in Maori health research and led by Dr Sarah-Jane Paine, the Centre is also leading the world in work on the epidemiology of sleep disorders. They are, uniquely, following a kaupapa Maori methodology – looking at an equal number of Maori and non-Maori. They can then examine the risk factors and understand each population at an equal level of statistical detail.

“That is really important if you are thinking about services that are going to reduce disparities in sleep health,” says Philippa Gander, Centre head. This work has attracted international interest.

The team includes a qualified commercial pilot, Dr Leigh Signal, Maori health researchers, psychologists, sleep physiologists, and a bio-statistician – and Philippa says the successes of the Centre are very much a team effort.

“We’re very dedicated to the cause and the team works really hard to get results. It’s an encouraging and positive workplace to be in.”

Find out more about careers in this area, and how you can do it too.

Social work

It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a social worker to raise a village.

Social work is about helping individuals, families, and communities resolve personal and social difficulties. Social workers also promote policy options which provide a better living environment.

Social workers help people overcome problems by finding resources, setting up assistance programmes, and helping people make plans for the future. They also propose policy to government agencies.

Find out more about possible careers and how you can do it too.

Speech & language therapy

Think how amazing and interesting your life is because you can sit around a table, eat and communicate your thoughts and ideas with friends.

How relaxing is it to read a magazine or book. Think how different your life would be if you couldn’t do these things.

The ability to comprehend language and communicate is unique to humans. So, disorders affecting this can be life changing.

Speech and Language therapy examines the underlying causes behind disorders that effect communication, cognition and swallowing.

Speech and language therapists work with people from birth to old age diagnosing, assessing and treating communication impairments that result from developmental problems, congenital problems, traumatic brain injury, stroke or neurological damage. They work with people to restore language and speech, helping them to communicate and connect with others.

Find out more about how you can do it too.