The Sister Alison Bush Scholarship honours the first Indigenous midwife in New South Wales and aims to prepare Aboriginal women with the skills needed to work in remote communities.
The program is open to a variety of health workers eager to develop their training in one of Sydney's largest maternity hospitals.
"Whether a person's working as an Aboriginal health education officer, a nurse, a midwife or a doctor, we’d be very interested in hearing from them,” says the Sydney local health district clinical manager, Karen Redrup.
Ms Redrup says the program will provide living assistance to applicants from remote regions of Australia.
"We look after all the accommodation and the logistics side of it, so we put someone up in a local hotel and sort out their meals and requirements from that perspective," said Ms Redrup.
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Aboriginal liaison midwife Skye Parsons says the scholarship also provides after-hours support.
"It might be that I’ll hang out with them after, we’ll go out for dinner or we’ll go to the beach because it’s a big thing to come to the city, not know anybody, have no idea and only have support in place in-hours, so it’s nice to see a familiar face and a friendly face," said Ms Parsons.
The recipient is encouraged to return home to their community and provide culturally appropriate care to other Indigenous women.
"It's so important that those skills do get taken back to their communities so the Aboriginal girls out there can feel like they're being looked after by their own people," said Ms Parsons.
Applications for the Sister Alison Bush Scholarship will re-open in March this year.
