In July this year we welcomed Olivia Farrer to her role as Teaching Specialist (Clinical Practitioner) role with the Nutrition and Dietetics Department at Flinders University. Olivia has been doing some regular teaching in the department for the last few years alongside her PhD studies and was excited to gain a more permanent position within the department. She shares with us her what her new role involves, her areas of interest and career to date.

My teaching role will be to bring my experience as a practising Dietitian into the classroom through a number of topics. Next year I will be involved with the 2nd years in Food Products and Preparation where we will build strong food knowledge and practical food preparation skills. Also the 3rd year Communication and Nutrition Counselling topic, where I really hope to share my experience with students as they learn to interact with patients and become active members of multidisciplinary teams. Finally, I will also be supporting food service placements in the first half of 2018, so it will be a busy start to the year but a great chance to become more familiar with more of our topics and students.

My time as a practising dietitian have been varied, from clinical roles in large teaching hospitals, to community work for Diabetes SA as well as consulting to aged care and my own private practice; so I am looking forward to be able to draw on this to provide some ‘real world’ context to my teaching. This is how I enjoy learning and I hope I can engage our students in the same way. From 2018 I will be based at Flinders part time, typically Monday – Wednesday. When not teaching you will find me looking at ways we can improve our teaching through evaluation, and ways to keep our curriculum fresh and relevant for our students.