ROADBLOCKS to getting more students through the door will not stop La Trobe University eyeing ambitious research plans for its health school.
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The La Trobe Rural Health School - which is headquartered in Bendigo - is celebrating its 10th birthday and vice-chancellor John Dewar says the next decade's focus will be on making it a "global research powerhouse".
He would also like more students but says that could be trickier.
The number of Australians enrolling in Bendigo and at other La Trobe campuses have been limited by reforms to student loans, which tied the number of available university places to the growth rate of the working aged population.
Previously, universities could enrol as many students as the market allowed.
"We can obviously try to attract more international students, which we are trying to do, but that will never be a major driver of growth," Professor Dewar said.
"But you don't cap ambitions to be great at research."
The La Trobe Rural Health School has had a heavy focus on rural health research ever since it was founded in 2009.
During that time it has attracting more than $8,400,00 in funding.
The money has helped wide-ranging work to understand communities from the "inside out", head of school Pamela Snow said.
Projects have included efforts to fight poor oral health, teach children to read and help families of those with dementia can navigate complex health systems.
"This critical work has resulted in policy changes at all levels of government, and countless community-led initiatives that have significant and lasting impact," Professor Snow said.
The school has outposts at all regional La Trobe campuses and Professor Dewar hopes another 10 years will see it grow stronger.
"In the end it comes down to whether we are recognised, globally, as one of the research leaders in rural health," he said.
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The school will also continue to focus on teaching new generations of students in the hope they will stay in regional areas once they graduate.
About 70 per cent of students go on to work in regional and rural areas.
"We now have over 3000 students studying in the rural health school across all of our regional campuses. They do about 400,000 hours of student placement and we have 360 clinical partners," he said.
"This far exceeds any expectations we had 10 years ago."
Isolated? overwhelmed? Caring for someone with dementia? There's an app for that
CARING for someone with dementia can feel isolating wherever you live, especially if your home is in a rural area, researcher Clare Wilding says.
"In a very small community there might not be anyone else who has the same kind of situation as you."
Dr Wilding is part of a La Trobe University-led team which testing a world-first app for an online community of dementia carers across different 12 rural communities, including Heathcote and the Macedon Ranges.
The team gave an update on its complex two-and-a-half year project at the 2019 Rural Health Conference in Bendigo on Wednesday.
They are in the midst of evaluating it ahead of an expansion next year, lead-researcher Irene Blackberry said.
"Australia is such a big country with not enough people to connect. I know technology can come with black-spots, etc, but it is improving and even older people do adopt it," she said.
"So this is only the beginning, if you like, to try to connect them."
The app has chat and video conferencing functions to help people connect.
"They can find people in a very similar situation to their own. That indeed happened with one of our participants," Dr Wilding said.
"She talked about how that really decreased her sense of isolation. She could see there was someone else, in a rural community, caring for a father with a particular type of dementia her father had."
The app also allowed people whose loved ones were nearing the end of their "dementia journeys" and lives to share advice and support with carers just starting out, Dr Wilding said.
"That's very empowering ... to be able to help others out as much as they were helped earlier on," she said.
The app also has information compiled by experts from universities, who use their skills to make sure bite-sized and relevant advice is provided to people at all stages of the dementia journey.
"We know there's a lot of information on the internet but it can be very overwhelming for people," she said.
"Universities have skills in teaching and research, so it's about making that information accessible for people.
"And of course universities can do a very rigorous evaluation, which many health and community services just don't have the skills to conduct."
The app would have proven a particularly large and complex project for many other groups to undertake, Dr Wilding said. It has included two-and-a-half years of community consultations and technological development.
"That's really important because you don't want to put a lot of money into something that isn't going to be effective or useful," she said.
Dr Wilding said that while it is still too early to share complete findings from the evaluation it is clear app users think it has been worthwhile.
"Feedback so far is that it's been very easy to use, had provided good information and has not been overwhelming, which is what we set out to achieve," she said.
Most users have been women between 34- and 76-years-of-age.
"Most of our carers are the children of people living with dementia and we have a significant number of people who are spouses," she said.
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