Nurses play an important role in the healthcare system

Nurses help others to better health. They are involved in a range of health care activities that are designed to provide care to people with acute, chronic and complex health conditions. 

Nursing students graduate with a diverse range of real, practical skills ready for a rewarding career with a world of opportunities. You’ll be entering a growing industry that is essential to the support of individuals, families and communities.

Belong to one of the best

Go beyond the textbook:

  • Practical placements are built into our industry accredited degrees. The Bachelor of Nursing degree contains 840 hours of work-based placements. Every clinical placement will develop the practical skills that you need to become a sought after graduate. 
  • Diverse graduates: There are a variety of placements available from private and public hospitals to community and aged care facilities in urban or regional areas.
  • Clinical learning labs: Our clinical learning laboratories use leading technology to give you the closest experience to seeing real patients.

UOW Nursing students practice patient care in practical labs

Earn a recognised qualification:

Our health degrees are recognised by professional associations in Australia and overseas. Depending on your chosen course, health graduates qualify to apply for membership of relevant professional societies such as:

See individual course descriptions for more detail.

UOW Nursing student practices using a stethoscope

 

Study close to home:

No matter which UOW campus you choose, you become part of one big community of learning. The UOW Bachelor of Nursing  course is offered at UOW metro and regional campuses located in:

UOW Nursing students stand in Liverpool on a busy street

Discover your passion, then develop the specialist skills that employers want:

  • Diverse graduates: At UOW, the skills you will learn are highly-transferable across a range of careers. We focus on producing graduates who can work in a diversity of health care settings including rural and regional Australian, as well as internationally.
  • Specialist skills: Further your career with a specialist postgraduate qualification, or contribute to the advancement of health knowledge through a research degree. Our postgraduate curriculum reflects the latest approach to health and medical education, and incorporates existing and emerging information technologies.

A UOW rehabilitation and gerontology graduate helps an elderly woman on a walking frame

A degree from UOW opens doors:

  • Industry collaboration: UOW has a strong research reputation in collaboration with industry, and partnerships with major health providers such as Workcover and Health NSW. 
  • Access to experts: You'll learn first-hand from professional nurses, doctors, dietitians, exercise physiologists, medical scientists, health administrators and researchers, and study in the home of ground-breaking health and medicine research.
  • Be rewarded: Earn an industry sponsored scholarship.
  • Give back: From your first year, you will have opportunities to participate in a wide range of volunteer and enrichment activities in the community. These will assist you in developing real-world skills and ready for a career in health and medicine.
  • Get noticed: Gain valuable real-world experience, and make professional connections that will help launch your career, with a professional health placement.

A UOW nursing alumni stands in an Illawarra Health hospital

2nd in NSW

UOW ranks second in NSW and the ACT for undergraduate Nursing.

Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) 2023

Become one of the world's most employable graduates

Health care has been the biggest provider of new jobs in Australia and is projected to contribute 14.9% of employment growth from 2018 to 2023. UOW produces graduates who are committed to improving the health of individuals, communities and populations. 

Here is just a sample of the careers you can pursue:

  • Clinical nurse consultant
  • Emergency nurse
  • Health promotion officer
  • Nurse educator
  • Nurse manager
  • Registered nurse
  • Scientific researcher
  • Specialist nurse

Read more: What can I do with my degree? 

Meet Juda

I'd heard about UOW's School of Nursing. Their employment rates were incredible, on top of brand-new facilities that are only going to get better with further development of the uni. UOW SWS is a community-based uni, smaller, and more compact, which made the idea of uni seem less foreign and less intimidating. I was being offered top-tier education in the heart of Liverpool, in an environment that is supportive, local and close-knit. Juda BACHELOR OF NURSING

Turn your passion into purpose

Studying Nursing at UOW prepares you for your career. Mikaela and Joelle share how clinical and simulation labs and workplace experience have prepared them to care for real patients.

More alumni stories

When I came to Wollongong for the first time I looked around the area and immediately I just felt at home. So I rang my mum and I said "this is it" and I signed up and started my nursing degree. The simulation labs at UOW have helped me gain my confidence and consolidate my nursing skills. We use the mannequins; they're able to breathe and have different symptoms so we get a real experience. So we can assess each patient differently and prioritise their care which has helped in my clinical placements.
 
Growing up in a rural town myself in Bega New South Wales I was quite interested in regional health. By studying at Wollongong University I've been able to do a four-week placement in Broken Hill and see some of the differences in healthcare out there. I've also been able to go out to Alice Springs and see different healthcare centres and hospitals there and that's really opened my eyes to all the different things that I could do in rural health.

Study in the home of health research

Medical research Justin Yerbury with his IHMRI research team

Illawarra Health & Medical Research Institute

IHMRI is a not-for-profit organisation that supports researchers in the Illawarra who are striving to find better ways to treat disease and illness.

UOW Health Impacts Nutrition researchers serve breakfast to primary school children

Health Impacts Research Centre

The Health Impacts Research Centre brings together diverse groups of researchers to improve the health of whole communities.


Global Challenges

The Global Challenges program brings together diverse groups of world-class researchers to address real-world problems - from Living Well Longer, to Building Resilient Communities.

We're fearless in the pursuit of our purpose. At UOW, you'll have ground-breaking research at your fingertips.

Dementia friendly communities

Our population continues to age at a rapid rate, presenting a myriad of consequences for society. Interdisciplinary researchers at UOW are working to create dementia-friendly communities - to enhance the way people with dementia are able to interact within their physical, social, and cultural environments.

LEARN MORE

Currently, we have about 300,000 people living in Australia with dementia and because of the aging of our population, by 2050 that'll be almost a million people. Hi, my name is Lynne Phillipson. I'm an NHMRC Dementia fellow. If we're going to make a community more dementia-friendly, it's not going to be something that happens because of a single person or because of a single discipline. A program like Global Challenges was really important to address a complex sticky problem like improving a community environment. We need to be able to work with researchers and people with expertise about how we engage the community members, how we work to improve knowledge and attitudes around dementia. So the disciplines that we engaged to help us see if we could make Kiama dementia-friendly were engineering, psychologists and designers, human geographers and public health researchers.
 
My name is Richard Fleming. I'm a Professorial Fellow here in the School of Nursing at the University of Wollongong. My speciality is Environmental Design for people with dementia. So within the dementia-friendly communities project, I've been working on developing a way of evaluating public buildings. One of the real strengths of this project
has been working with people with dementia and their carers. Without their help, it wouldn't have been possible to develop the assessment tool that we've developed. Having them in the development team was extremely important, in fact, a vital part of the project.
 
I'm Chris Brennan-Horley and I'm a human geographer. I'm the maps guy. With this project, I work with GIS and I'm helping bring together all the spatial data for this. The maps have really been helpful in letting us know about the places and spaces that are important for people living with dementia in Kiama. They've really helped the community living down there to understand what it is the people living with dementia like and dislike. So the maps have helped us understand some of those aspects of the physical environment that have been challenging. Things like particular crosswalks and sidewalks, signage on particular streets.
 
Dementia is a global challenge and it's not one that we can fix just with medical solutions. It's one that we have to fix it a community level and it takes all of us to make a change.

A brighter future starts here

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