Professor Lorna Moxham (bottom left) with participants during Recovery Camp, which she co-founded. Photos: Supplied.
Once an underprivileged student who failed her HSC and nursing training, mental health nurse Professor Lorna Moxham is now a finalist in the 2024 Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers, thanks to co-founding the innovative Recovery Camp program.
Based in the University of Wollongong’s (UOW) School of Nursing and now holding multiple degrees and a PhD, Professor Moxham co-founded the learning program Recovery Camp with Dr Christopher Patterson. The program brings together people with a mental illness alongside students undertaking placements in nursing, allied health and paramedicine to spend five days in a therapeutic recreation camp in the bush.
Overcoming the issue of nurses finding work placements makes Professor Moxham a fitting finalist in the award by the Australian College of Nursing (ACN), which recognises nurses whose leadership has led to innovative solutions to address key challenges.
Describing it as “humbling”, Professor Moxham said it was also recognition for the work done by the Recovery Camp’s Illawarra team and her co-founder.
But it’s all a far cry from where she started four decades ago.
“I think I was being a little bit naughty choosing nursing because my dad wanted me to be a teacher, which is funny because I’ve ended up being a nurse teacher,” she said.
Professor Moxham said she was raised and educated in a background she described as being “far from privileged”.
“I went to Corrimal High and I didn’t do very well at school at all. There were lots of failures,” she said.
“Mum and Dad were really quite poor and I grew up in a housing commission house, but it shows what’s possible.
“Us as kids from non-privileged backgrounds, we can make a difference.”
It was finding what she loved that changed things for her, leading her from failing her year 12 HSC to now having multiple degrees, including a PhD.
“Even when I started my nursing, I failed that as well,” she said of being relegated from a student nurse to an enrolled nurse.
“After a couple of years at Concord Hospital and finishing my enrolled nursing, which is a step below registered nursing, they sent me to the psychiatric ward.”
She admitted that at age 19 she was petrified because of the stigma surrounding mental health at the time.
However, once completing her training, she applied to the Rozelle Hospital in Sydney, becoming a registered psychiatric nurse in 1985.
This coincided with her move into academia, with nursing education starting its transition to the higher education sector in 1985, piquing her interest and a journey of ongoing professional development.
“I thought, ‘What’s all this university business about?’ not at all thinking I was very bright, because there’d been a series of failures,” she said.
“I went to uni and found I could do it because it was nursing and I was learning about my passion, and I did OK.”
Fast-forward and she is now professor of mental health nursing at UOW, having co-founded Recovery Camp in 2013.
Professor Moxham said the idea was an answer to universities having trouble securing clinical placements when she first arrived at UOW in 2012.
“It’s because all nursing students have to do 800 hours of placements across their degree, so it’s quite hard to get placements,” she said.
“Mental health is a specialty, so it’s even harder to get those placements.”
She said when she first posed the idea to UOW and then undertook the first camp, she thought it was a long shot.
“A week away fully immersed with people who have a serious mental illness as a clinical placement for students was way outside anything that had been done before,” she said.
“So off we went for that first camp, really thinking, ‘We’ve got 20 students here we can push through this clinical placement’.
“Halfway through the week, it became obvious to me that it not only made a difference to them, but it made a difference to the people with mental illness.
“It has grown into something I never expected but truly cherish for the impact it has made on the lives of participants.”
Professor Moxham said with Dr Patterson taking on the commercialisation of the program, it was now the only evidenced-based, social enterprise that had been commercialised, and thus made sustainable, in Australia.
She said it was now delivered in three states and had seen 43 camps, with 14 universities on board, accommodating 600 people with mental illness and contributing to professional development for facilitators, providing a pipeline to the mental health nursing workforce.
“Consumers are open, they talk about what it’s like to be taken to hospital, how they deal with their voices and about involuntary admission to mental health facilities,” she said.
“The students, on the other side, really value mental health nursing.
“They see people who are very vulnerable and gain life-changing experience that makes them better in their chosen field.”
ACN interim CEO, Emeritus Professor Leanne Boyd FACN, said the award finalists had developed pioneering nurse-led solutions to address the complex health needs of the Australian population and were living proof of rewarding career pathways in nursing.
The winner will be announced from 14-16 August in Cairns.
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