Making special deliveries

Bachelor of Midwifery graduate Kathryn Cruickshanks spoke to us about the clinical placements she was involved in during her second year that helped make her a better practitioner.

"I really liked placements. From our second semester we spent five weeks of every 12-week semester on a hospital placement, and I've been at the Royal Women's, Sunshine and Berwick hospitals.

The theory component of the course starts to make sense when you're on placement. It's a really good way of gaining skills and the confidence to put your knowledge into practice, and the placement matches your learning stage. You only practise procedures you have learnt in your lectures, tutorials and labs.

Midwifery is a broad field covering the whole range of women's health. I will choose to specialise in obstetrics, which is pregnancy, birthing and postnatal care. We're expected to deliver 40 babies during our three-year course, and I still find delivering babies an incredibly personal and moving experience.

I love uni life, but until you experience the workplace you don't really understand the career. It's great to see how the hospital system works. Watching others and their strengths and weaknesses helps you work out how you want to be with patients when you graduate."

Kathryn studied

Bachelor of Midwifery (now Bachelor of Midwifery/Bachelor of Nursing)

Browse all health and biomedicine courses at Victoria University.