“It’s rewarding for me to come to work every day knowing I can go home and say that I’ve done my part!”
After starting out as a patient services assistant, or PSA, Neil was determined to progress further within the Western Health team. Thus, with the support of Western Health and a lot of determination, he has now worked his way up to a theatre technician role (and he’s loving every minute of it)!
If you want to follow in Neil’s footsteps and lock down a rewarding career in healthcare, tune into our latest interview, where he tells us all about:
- The ongoing training that Western Health employees can access
- The steps that he took to lock down his dream job
- Which skills are most desirable in Western Health Applicants
- The rewarding feeling that comes from helping others all-day
- How Western Help empowers aspiring healthcare pros to enter the industry
Find out more
If you’re looking to kickstart a career in healthcare, it’s time for you to get acquainted with Western Health! Their rapidly expanding and incredibly passionate team delivers a comprehensive, integrated range of clinical services in areas such as emergency medicine, intensive care and medical and surgical services. Essentially, they do it all!
What’s more, unlike other healthcare providers that make you wait until you’ve finished school to start your career, Western Health offers a (very rare) Secondary School Work Experience Program! This initiative allows Year 10 students the opportunity to explore the health industry early and make sure it’s the right fit for them!
To learn more about all the good work being done by Western Health, head over to their employer profile and start your healthcare journey today.
Interview Transcript
My name is Neil Navarro.
I’m an operation theatre technician and I work at Western Health.
My role is an operation theatre technician.
My role is to help prepare patients for their surgery.
I look after the equipment and set up the operation theatre for surgery.
Originally started as APSA, otherwise known as a patient services assistant.
During COVID, I knew that I wanted to move on to the next career progression from APSA.
Found out about a role called an operation theatre technician, studied for it and I was very fortunate enough to get the role whilst I was studying.
And so by the time I’d completed my studies, I had all the experience required for the job.
So I was very lucky to have a leg up on the rest of my class.
Last week I had an old high school teacher as a patient, whom I haven’t seen since 2006.
To me, it felt very heartwarming or very awesome that, you know, he gets to see like how I’m doing and I get to catch up with him and how he’s been since.
So, I don’t know, it feels pretty rewarding for me to be able to help people who’ve helped me coming up.
Western Health actually has a few connections in which they help people get into the health industry.
They actually have a course that introduces people into the industry to start off as PSAs in terms of helping people with their career progression.
Yeah, they’re very supportive.
They encourage you to see where you want to go, and they do what they can to help get you where you need to be.
So I remember when I was APSA, quite a lot of the nurses were very supportive in terms of helping my career progress.
So they went and found out some of the information that I needed to become a theatre technician for me, got me in contact with the department heads about how to become a theatre tech.
And yeah, so I think Western Health in general is pretty supportive.
So through Western Health, they help progress my theatre technician career through ongoing training.
They’ll have you starting off with a certain specialty with all the knowledge you need for that.
Meaning as you add more and more specialties to your knowledge base, you continue to get more training based on the requirements.
So, for example, you’ll get laser safety officer training when handling lasers in the operation theatre.
Helping people to help yourself.
So what I mean by that is it’s rewarding for me to come into work every day, helping people, knowing that I can come home saying that I’ve done my part, come home feeling rewarded for a good day’s work.
It feels like, you know, helping other people helps me feel like I’ve accomplished something today.
So one would be being a good communicator.
Second, I would say, is a good work ethic.
So working hard as part of a team.
