Some courses have specific immunisation requirements, for example, course offered by the Faculty of Health and the Faculty of Education.  If you are enrolled in a course which requires you to undergo a vaccination program, start this NOW!!  

Many vaccination schedules involve a series of injections over several months, for example  Hepatitis B.  This means that you need to plan ahead to make sure that you have the necessary immunity to participate in placement activities.

Failure to undertake required vaccinations may affect your ability to participate in certain elements of your course, or place others in the community at risk. For example, all students should have the influenza vaccine before attending a nursing home or hospital placement, or a whooping cough vaccine before working with young children and babies in childcare.

As your workload is starting to increase, so too does the demands placed on your body. Take a quick inventory of your health so that you are helping your body to work at its best.

Dealing with Stress

Stress is a word that we are all familiar with, and being stressed is a feeling we all know.  

Stress is an emotional and physical response to an outside pressure.  When we experience a real or imagined threat, the body’s defences react automatically resulting in us either feeling like running away (flight), fighting or "freezing" ie. feeling as thought we being unable "to do anything".

Managing stress is about taking charge of our thoughts and feelings, our environment, our time table and the way we respond to problems and stressors.

A degree of stress is helpful, it gets us motivated to get off the couch and go for a walk, or helps us to turn off the computer game or TV and get on with writing the essay that is due. A excess of stress is not much fun and can have us experiencing a range of physical, mental and emotional symptoms.

Guided relaxation and meditation exercises can really help deal with stress by activating our bodies relaxation response.  When practiced regularly they can be very effective tools against stress.  The Counsellors from the Health & Counselling Centre are currently at the stage of putting together their own CD of guided relaxation and meditation exercises which will soon be available for purchase.