New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

Working in the health sector and needing a 'pick me up'?  'Passion for Health' is essentially an archive of short video clips featuring health professionals from various backgrounds talking about what keeps them interested, engaged and (as per the label on the box) passionate about their work.  This is a free-to-view resource that aims, according to the website, to 'create a useful, inspiring and popular web resource which revitalises health professionals by reminding them of why they chose to work in health care and to provide a source of inspiration and guidance for those entering the health professions'. 

The website so far features about 40 video clips from nurses, doctors as well as a smattering of radiologists and health care managers, mostly working in Australia.  The clips appear to be 3-5 minutes in lengths so are easy to download and not time consuming to watch.  The videos have been edited, presumably taking selected extracts from longer interviews with the participants, which makes each clip a little more content rich.  In effect, this website could be considered the clinician's version of the DiPEx initiative, which was set up to collect and disseminate the lived experiences of people will illness and disability. 

My only concern about this website is that there is very little to guide you through the content.  There is no 'most popular video' link for instance, and it is not possible to find out about content of each video until you click on the webpage for it.  There is a 'Search' engine on the website, but because there is only a little content you really have to know what you are looking for in order to find it - (probably like the NZRA website at present, I guess!)  Exploring the 'Advanced Search' function, I was somewhat bemused to find 'Clown' listed as one of the possible tags for the videos alongside 'Nurse', 'Surgeon', 'Physician' etc., and ended up going through all 40+ videos on this website to try to find the one that had a clown in it - but unfortunately, no luck.  This did send me off on one of those (usually time wasting) tangential internet searches to stumble across a whole community of clown-doctors on a Patch Adams kind of path, wearing rubber noses and launching annual 'Smile Day' initiatives and so forth.  Google 'clown doctor' sometime - you might be surprised!

But back to 'Passion for Health' - the website appears to have been set up just over a year ago, but has been largely inactive in the last 40 weeks.  Hopefully content continues to be added however, including input from other clinical groups, as this is an interesting venture worth continuing if only because archiving people stories and experiences has historical value.

One final word of warning, the website for this initiative is 'www.passionforhealth.com.au/' and not 'passionforhealth.com/', the latter of which appears to be an for-profit alternative medicine organisation selling 'Emotional Freedom Techniques', 'EmoTrance(TM)', and 'Detox Clinics' - another kettle of fish altogether.