Joanna Knott OAM

Thank you Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Faculty Dean, Council members, staff, distinguished guests, graduates, your families and friends. It is actually an honour to attend today’s graduation, and can I say congratulations to all of you for your hard work. As emerging leaders in your field, it is sensible to have chosen health care, as it’s one professional category which promises to grow at a time, as you know, of major disruptions in our workforce. Yet at some time, especially in an ageing population, and with issues like obesity, we will almost all need health professionals. So what on earth is a graduate in modern history, politics and business studies doing talking to you today? Well, I can think of at least a few links, since nursing and allied health have turned out to be a bigger part of my life than I would have thought when graduating.

Nothing at university quite prepares you for random things that can happen in life, despite any amount of training or study. Some 10 years after my graduation from a UK university, and three years after moving out to Australia, I went on what should have been a fun weekend of skiing with friends. I arrived as a healthy young woman, yet less than 24 hours later, I left the resort of Thredbo by helicopter with a broken neck, almost dying in hospital two days later, and pronounced with a severe spinal injury, paralysed from the chest down. So my first link to your career choice from then on, nursing and allied health featured quite prominently in my life, clearly initially as a means of survival in hospital, and for many months of rehab, I was helped by nurses and physios. And later, once living at home, I have hired many people, including student nurses and health workers, to help me with the physical side of my life. Indeed, by sheer coincidence, and as an aside, one of today’s midwifery graduates happened to have worked with me over a five-year period. Can I say congratulations Georgie, wherever you are out there? So physios continue to work with me, not just on home visits, but over the last five years, at an exercise program called Neuromoves, designed specifically for people with spinal injuries. There are many devastating issues I could talk about today in terms of the implication of this injury, but from a patient perspective, what is the biggest tip I can give you as health workers? Well, if I had to choose one thing, I think it is to please show compassion and understanding, because despite a changing circumstance, and the fear that comes with change or trauma, people want to be treated as if we all want to be treated with respect and care.

Indeed, what you would want for yourself, your own family member or your close friend. We all play roles in life, but to be thrown into being a patient suddenly can be overwhelming. In my case, I woke up in hospital, and before anyone had a chance to explain to me, I was being termed a ‘quad’, which is short for quadriplegic, with all the issues of immobility, temperature control, loss of control, etcetera, that that entails. So alien was this in all my trauma that I had to cling to the fact that I was actually still a human being, and despite my then-paralysed state, voice my need to be treated like one. My mother, herself a nurse, who flew out from the UK to be with me, was unfortunately insensitively told at the time, ‘Your daughter’s not the same person anymore. As soon as she gets used to the indignity, the better.’ Horrific, and wrong, and I should say not reflective of the many lovely health workers that worked with me at the time. But what I’m saying is, whether it’s the mother going into labour or a person being treated for a physical condition in the clinic, please, please talk to the person, not their condition, and with appropriate empathy. I realise this isn’t always easy. Good communication and patience takes time. News like mine may not always be good, and this has to be done in the context of an ever-challenged health care system, where time equals money, so patient ratio allocation is always against you. But believe me, by contrast today, I regularly see the uplifted faces of many a young person with a spinal injury of maybe just a year, working with young health workers of a similar age at Neuromoves, the exercise place that I mentioned earlier, and being treated with understanding and as an equal. And I see a sense of relief – relief – in their faces, for perhaps a semblance of normality after a huge trauma has entered their lives again. And I think this is largely because your courses today thankfully put more emphasis on the importance of communication and patient-centred care, which is a great thing.

Indeed, looking back to when I graduated, other things have changed. Nursing and midwifery were only just moving into the universities there, and other good things – these days the incidence of baby mortality have decreased, from about 19 in 1000 babies in the late seventies, compared to about 6 in 1000 in Sydney today. Although of course much still has to be done in developing countries, and even in our own central Australia. Still, other challenges over the next decade for health care include an ageing midwifery staff, with not enough nurses to replace this experienced workforce nationwide, and worldwide. Changing demographics and women having babies later, and also more medical challenges with health care, with health risk pregnancies. So leaders will need to be highly trained, and committed to keeping up with their demands. Similarly, in health and sports science, since the eighties, changes have included much more evidence-based research available, in all areas of health, whether for people disabled by conditions or not. And it was developments like this and in areas like neuroscience and technological progress, and discoveries like stem cells, combined with my own frustration, honestly, of why can’t spinal injuries be cured, that allowed me to get another thing in common with health practitioners.

Along with a neuroscientist and a lawyer, we set up the not-for-profit Spinal Cure Australia, and we’ve spent many years, as has been mentioned, raising funds and working with health workers, consumers, governments, and philanthropists to generate funds for research to stop paralysis. Many years later, and I find myself involved in another thing that will link me with health and other faculties at UTS, such as bioengineering and science, as we’ve just launched a very exciting, cross-collaborative initiative called Project Edge. Projectedge.org.au aims to reverse the paralysing effects of people with spinal injuries that devastate the lives of so many Australians through offering hope of recovery. That’s huge when you bear in mind that a new spinal injury happens every day in Australia, and mainly to young people, generally in their 20s, from car or sporting accidents. Promising therapies will be tested in the people here that so desperately needed them via a multidisciplinary headed by neuroscientist Professor Bryce Vissel of UTS’s new Centre for Neuroscience and Rehabilitation Medicine, and later on a world research program for exercise training for people with mobility issues – not just spinal, but perhaps Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, will be established. Who knows, maybe some of you graduating today may come and work at the centre in the future at a very optimistic time for people with spinal injuries.

So as Chair of Spinal Cure Australia, I would really like to wish you well in your future, and say I’m very proud to be part, or play a small part, in a university like UTS that’s not just technologically and performance-focused, but also emphasises the importance of equity, diversity and social principles. So in true UTS style, enjoy your graduation day with your friends and family, and get out there and go change the world. Thank you very much.