Yasmin Dowla

7.30 AM

On office days, I set my alarm for 7.30 am so that I have time to make breakfast and get ready for work. I typically go into the office two days a week - my team will always come in on Tuesdays and then I like to come in either Wednesday or Thursday as well to see my friends from other teams or if I have coffee/lunch plans with friends from other divisions.

9.00 AM

I’m lucky that I live close to work so I can just walk to Sirius, which saves me time and money and means I can sleep in a bit longer.

9.05 AM

Today is a Tuesday so all my co-workers are in, and I start my day by chatting with them and finding a desk to set up my workstation.

Currently, I work on Level 7 which is the newest NWOW floor. This means that the entire floor has been renovated to adjust to flexible working practices at Health. This includes hot-desking, adjustable workstations, more meeting rooms and new technology to help make our time in the office more collaborative. Personally, I don’t mind hot-desking and we have personal lockers that we can store whatever we need to leave at the office overnight. (I also think the new décor and design of the office are really nice).

Usually, when I work from home, I start my workday by greeting my colleagues on Webex in our team chat so that they know I’m online and ready to get started.

In the office, I check my emails and look at my calendar to see what meetings I’ll have to plan my work around today. I write down an updated task list for the day and ask my team members if I have any questions.

10.00 AM

We have a team meeting in room 774 so we all gather up our notebooks and laptops and walk together to the meeting room. This room is good because we can connect one of our laptops to the television screen and see whoever is joining the meeting whilst they are working from home.

I’m completing my third rotation of the Graduate Program in the Ageing and Aged Care Division - specifically in the Aged Care Workforce Development Section. This section manages government-funded programs targeted towards addressing the workforce crisis in the aged care sector. I’m enjoying the work and one of my key projects is developing a new program that will facilitate nursing students to undertake clinical placements in the care and support sector. The aim of this is to provide students with a good experience working in aged care so that they are more likely to return to the sector after they graduate.

In our team meeting today, we have quite a few deadlines coming up for important work. We discussed the four Roundtables that our section is responsible for organising and that will be held at Parliament House in less than a month. We have to draft New Policy Proposals (NPP’s) that will be due at the end of the month. We also discuss the logistics around the team planning day that we’re going to have on Friday. Each team member gives an update on the program that they are responsible for, but our work overlaps a lot and we work as a team.

11.00 AM

We have a meeting with a state health service to consult with them on the Clinical Placements Program and I take detailed notes so that we can refer to them when we draft our procurement documents.

11.20 AM

We debrief after the meeting and discuss the main priorities for our team moving forward.

11.30 AM

I walk back to my workstation and draft a response to a ministerial correspondence (min corro) that has been assigned to me and I set up folders on TRIM (our record management system) for the roundtable invitations and create spreadsheets to track the responses.

12.30 PM

I go out to lunch with my group of friends who are also in the Graduate Program at Health. We have regularly scheduled lunches and we take turns choosing where we will eat. One of the girls chose Space Kitchen, which is a short walk from Sirius and is known for having excellent dessert options, but their savoury food is good too. I usually take an hour for lunch, since my workday is 8.30 am – 5.00 pm. As long as you work for 7.5 hours, I find that most teams are very flexible about what hours you choose to work.

1.30 PM

I return to my workstation and continue working through my list of tasks for the day. This included preparing for an important meeting and jotting down key topics to raise. I also booked a room for the meeting through Outlook.

5.00 PM

Since I’m only a Graduate, I don’t regularly work beyond 5.00 pm. When all my urgent tasks are completed, I say goodbye to my team and head home after a good, long day.

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