About the speaker

Our speaker today is Professor Terry Campbell AM.

Terry is Head of the Department of Medicine at St Vincent's Hospital, University of New South Wales, and Deputy Dean of Medicine at UNSW. He is a clinical cardiologist and clinical pharmacologist, and spent 10 years as Director of the Coronary Care Unit at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney.

He was previously the President of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand, and has been a Director of the NSW Division of the National Heart Foundation. He has been a member of a wide range of committees within St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, including the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee since 2001 and spent 17 years (including four years as Chair) on the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC).

Terry has been the Convenor of the Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC), now known as the Health-Science Alliance, focusing on the delivery of cutting-edge healthcare in a research-intensive environment.

Terry has a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University and a Doctor of Medicine from the University of New South Wales. In 2003, he was awarded as a member of the Order of Australia for his work on pharmacology and drug regulation.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Professor Terrence Campbell to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

Deputy Chancellor, Mr Brian Wilson,

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ross Milbourne,

Dean, Professor John Daley,

Distinguished Guests and most importantly New Graduates and your Families and Friends

Before proceeding I would like to add my personal acknowledgment of the Gadigal and Guring-Gai people of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands the University now stands.

Graduates, today symbolizes and officially marks your entry into a health profession, something of which you have every right to be extremely proud…. and I feel deeply honoured to be asked to address you on this incredibly important occasion in your lives.  I believe it’s traditional for the occasional speaker to endeavour to say something wise or clever to the graduates. I will do what I can, but I have been around universities and university students for long enough to realise how much more I learn from them than they from me.

When preparing what I would say today one of the first things I did was to look at a statement of the values of UTS:  Discover, Engage, Empower, Deliver, Sustain.  These five words say a lot about UTS and the kind of University it has always aspired to be and in my observation (having watched it develop and grow over many years now), these words also describe the kind of university that it has very much become.  It looks to the future and is committed to real world research that makes a difference, to work that is creative and career-focused.  I think UTS trains its health professionals in a way which encourages and inculcates this vision and these values in an exemplary manner.

A cynic could argue that these values are not much different from those espoused by any other university, but I do see that there are quite distinct notes in the values and in the language that is used around them, and I have certainly observed and felt this in my many interactions with UTS Health over the past few years.  In particular I guess I am saying that the University sees itself as part of, rather than apart from the community, and as being keen to engage, (and successful in doing so), beyond the ivory towers of academia.

What better way to engage with the community than by training in and joining one of the health professions, a group of interrelated disciplines which have so much in common, particularly centred around a desire to help one’s fellow human beings.  This idea of joining a “helping profession” has been through a fairly rocky period over the last few decades, exemplified by the cult of “greed is good”, which peaked in the 1980’s and 90’s, and has reappeared repeatedly in subsequent decades. 

I congratulate you for making the choices that you have, particularly as I am aware of the fact that many of you grew up during this time when a desire to help people rather than to help oneself was looked at somewhat askance by many in influential positions in society and in our political classes. 

Over the last century or thereabouts, the health professions and the biomedical scientists who have always worked alongside them, have achieved wonderful things and have dramatically improved the length and quality of life in many countries, very much including Australia.  There are now so many more things we can do for the sick and the needy and the injured that were not available even a couple of generations ago and this is wonderful and makes it an exciting time to be a young healthcare professional.

But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that there were many things that could be done 100 years ago and which still can be done today, and should be done today, which should not be forgotten in the rush to embrace the high technology we see around us all the time.  I’m speaking of course of the simple but incredibly important things like talking to people, listening to people, sitting with the sick (even though it takes time), comforting people, explaining what is going on, helping people to understand what might be happening to them.  These things are just as important as they always were but easier to forget because there are so many other things to do. It is about getting your priorities right.

In a way of course, healthcare in a country like Australia has become a victim of its own success.  Just this March an editorial piece in the Lancet was headed “The Cost of Healthcare in Australia”.  The gist of the article was really about the mooted $6 charge for a GP visit but of course it highlighted the way in which healthcare costs are growing, noting that our current annual health budget is $62 billon and heading fairly rapidly towards $75 billon within another couple of years.  That 60 or 70 billion dollars is divided up into 50 or 60 different silos of funding all but 2 of which are largely capped.  The 2 uncapped ones are the big ones of course: the MBS or Medicare Benefits and the PBS or the costs of the drugs that we subsidise in our health care system.  These are both rising faster than inflation and naturally enough grab the attention of governments of both persuasions. Discussions of this kind always lead to talk about rationing of healthcare, which politicians always run away from, but which of course has always been with us in one form or another and always will be. 

One large driver of the rising costs of healthcare is our very success in having so many more people live into their 80’s and 90’s and even beyond.  It is now a fact in Australia (which has life expectencies in the top 3 or so in the world), that a girl born today has a 50% chance of living to reach 100.  This of course is wonderful in many ways but it does change so much about how we live and work and care for our needy and elderly.  It challenges our society in ways well beyond healthcare of course, in terms of retirement ages, pension costs and so forth, but in particular relation to the health professions, is the growing prevalence of large numbers of frail and sometimes demented elderly, who need to be taken care of by the state and by healthcare professionals such as yourselves.

I have faith in the capacity of human beings to find solutions to these issues over time, and of course many of these solutions will come from graduates such as yourselves.  Much of it will come from research being done now or yet to be done.  And on that last note I’d like to say just a little something about the concept of an academic health centre or academic health science centre as they are variously known because I have spent a large part of my time in the past three years in developing this model with the assistance of many, including senior academics from this faculty and this university more widely. 

Briefly an academic health science centre is a model for delivery of cutting-edge healthcare and training in a research-intensive environment. This model has been a feature of the North American landscape for many decades and is now spreading in Europe and in the UK and there’s a very active international association of academic health centres which meets regularly including a meeting in Sydney a couple of years ago.  Fundamental to such centres is the belief that the best health care for the community is delivered in an environment where active research is also taking place. Such environments attract the brightest minds amongst health providers and are also very attractive to those working in basic medical research because of the exposure to clinicians and the enhanced opportunities for translation from bench to bedside. 

UTS Health and John Daly in particular (and Charlie Benrimoj too), has been very actively involved in the efforts that we have been carrying out to develop this model on several sites in metropolitan Sydney over the last 3 or 4 years, particularly sites based around the teaching hospitals at Randwick, but also at the St Vincent’s Darlinghurst precinct and the St George/Sutherland and the Liverpool/South West Sydney sites. 

Why am I talking about this? I realise that most of you will now be embarking on careers at the frontline, delivering healthcare and will probably not have much direct involvement in research.  My message is not that you should rethink this, because after all that’s exactly what you’ve been trained to do; my message is that during your professional lives you will have front row seats, and some capacity, to influence the way in which societies such as ours deal with the challenges of increasing health costs and demand.  My message is that at least some of the solutions to these problems will come from research and from collaboration and collegiality within disciplines and between disciplines…. within universities and between universities; and among healthcare providers, including private practitioners and hospital based practitioners and I would urge you to embark on your careers with a mindset favourably attuned to research, not necessarily to be doing it yourselves but to see it as critical and vital and important to have an interest in it and its findings, and when and where opportunities come along, perhaps to participate in advisory boards, clinical trials or other opportunities.  

It is now high time for me to get off the stage and let you all get on with enjoying this important day. I wish you congratulations and all the very best for your future careers.