Our Challenge

At Healthy Ireland Local Government, the importance of learning is uppermost on our agenda. We learn from our communities, colleagues, people in partner organisations and from academia.

Our latest learning source are the four students that were engaged on work experience in Kilkenny, Louth, Meath and Waterford who have been integral parts of service deliver for a semester in the third year of their degree courses. Timea, Lauren, Weronika and JJ worked with their local Healthy Ireland Coordinators successfully delivering the health and wellbeing message in their communities.

What were the benefits of the placements?

The students highlighted a number of areas of learning for their placement:

• The breath of work local authorities are involved with is much greater that they were aware of. In particular getting an understanding of the role of local authorities in enabling the health and wellbeing environment locally. This included dispelling the myth that working in a local authority mainly involves sitting behind a desk all day doing administrative processing.
• The context of local authorities with political representatives and the staff coming together to deliver the services needed.
• The importance of working on the ground with people in our communities listening to their needs and responding. How the “place” we live in impacts our health and wellbeing. The value of the personal touch was another important learning.
• How the modules they have taken in their degree courses are relevant to the work being undertaken in communities. The positive experiences of working in councils have left the participants open to the idea of a career in local government or partner organisations which is something they were not aware of previously.

Our coordinators in turn also benefitted from working with their student colleagues in a number of areas

• Access to current academic practice and thought from their courses and how relevant what is being thought is to the needs in our communities.
• Highlighted areas for us to improve on in terms of promoting what is done by local authorities in the wellbeing domain and ensuring this is communicated at college events like career fairs. Social media has an important role to play in promoting Healthy Ireland Local Government to younger people.
• The huge level of energy and productivity that can be gained by working with students. Example of some of the initiatives that were delivered include
  • Louth and Meath were able to get a mental health project which included community surveying and resource pack creation.
  • Waterford were able to get their Connecting Communities roadshow planned, resourced, and delivered to 7 locations across the county in the three municipal districts.
  • The European funded UcanAct project – ‘’Urban Action for cancer prevention’’ was launched operationally in Kilkenny. An official launch event was also held with Minister of State Hildegarde Naughton attending along with multiple local stakeholders. Local Health Needs and assessment and supporting reports were also delivered on the UcanAct project.

Opportunity for future engagement

The engagement of placement students is now a proven benefit for the Healthy Ireland team and the value to students is also evident. We hope that many more students will be given the opportunity to work in local authorities supporting Healthy Ireland Local Government. We encourage all Healthy Ireland Coordinators to engage with their third level institutions to offer students the opportunity to work with them.

Placements may be available in all 31 local authorities across the country – if you are interested in potential opportunities please contact your local Healthy Ireland Coordinator. The contact details can be found here (Link to Map Page for Healthy Ireland on Website)