Ending placement poverty in psychology (Solo)

Hey, mental workers. You're listening to the Mental Work podcast, the podcast about the realities of working in mental health for early career psychologists. As always, I'm your host, Dr. Bronwyn Milkins, and today we are talking about placement poverty. If you're a psychology student or no one, or you remember what it was like to be one, today's episode is likely to resonate.

To set the scene in Australian Federal Parliament, there is a petition calling on the government to expand a financial support scheme for students on placement to psychology students who are currently not covered in the scheme. We're going to unpack what that means, why it matters, and how you can help.

Firstly, what do we mean when we talk about placement poverty? It's a term that's been gaining traction in Australia and worldwide to describe the financial hardship that students experience when they're required to complete mandatory unpaid placements as part of their degree, and it's definitely not a small problem. According to survey data from the Health Students Alliance, 42% of students went hungry while on placement, ;not struggling to save, not cutting back on luxuries, hungry. That's bad.

For psychology students specifically, the picture is not good. The Australian Psychology Accreditation Council stipulates that students must spend 300 to a thousand hours depending on your particular pathway in placements to meet the competencies required for registration, and the vast majority of those are unpaid, which can leave a lot of students struggling.

As I said at the top of the episode, the federal government does have a scheme designed to address exactly this problem, the problem of unpaid placements. It's called the Commonwealth Prac Payment. The Commonwealth Prac Payment was announced in the 2024-25 budget, and the Australian government invested over $427 million over four years to establish a payment of $331 bucks per week for university students undertaking mandatory placements as part of their teaching nursing, midwifery, or social work degrees.

The idea is to help students with living and study expenses during these compulsory placements. Things like travel accommodation, uniforms, and lost income from other paid employment. So the idea is that some students were working, say part-time, and then they would have to quit or substantially reduce these hours at their other work in order to undertake the mandatory replacement.

This has been a really valuable initiative, and it's something that advocacy organisations and professional associations were calling for for years because it does recognise the significant unpaid workload of placements and the disproportionate impact that unpaid placements have on many students.

Here's the catch. The current programme excludes most allied health disciplines and medical students leaving them to undertake placements, which are often hundreds or thousands of hours long, often in regional or rural locations, without income support. So psychology students, occupational therapy students, physio, speech pathology, they're not covered at all under the current scheme.

So why were psychology students left out? The honest answer is that the initial rollout of the Commonwealth Prac Payment wasn't scoped to include psychology and most allied health disciplines. But the case for inclusion is pretty hard to argue with. There is clear evidence that students are dropping out, deferring or swapping to part-time study because they simply cannot afford to complete unpaid placement requirements.

For me, this is quite personal as well. During my fifth year, money was so tight that I was genuinely questioning whether I'd be able to pay rent, and it didn't get easier later on. During my most recent clinical masters, so this was a master's I've undertaken after I was already registered, I couldn't afford to undertake unpaid placements at all, full stop. Have a mortgage, have to pay that. This actually delayed me finishing my course by about a year because I had to keep on searching until I found something paid. And then to make it worse, I actually started a placement where the organisation told me upfront they'd pay me and I started and four weeks in, they changed their mind and said they couldn't pay me after all. So I had to quit and then push my placement completion back another year.

This is the kind of position this current system puts people in, and I'm on an isolated case, there have been other cases which people have come forward and shared of psychology students. For example, one person said that they went back to study after a 20 year break to address the lack of psychological services in her rural community. She now drives four hours each way to her placement, paying $300 a week in accommodation and living away from her family for 12 months. She could access some grants, but that totaled $1,200 a year, which is nowhere near covering her actual costs.

Another case study that's been put forward and used by our professional associations is one person who has one free day a week between her masters and 300 hours of unpaid placement, which barely leaves any room for casual work, and I totally get that as well. I was so busy during my fifth year on top of assignments, the admin for the placement, and then completing the placement. It just, it can just be impossible. This person said that paid placements would've meant that she could move out of home and stop relying on her parents.

Finally, another person is about to start 1000 hours of unpaid placement work on top of coursework and a thesis after already pulling 70 hour weeks of study and work combined. So these are not edge cases. This is what the pathway into psychology actually looks like for a huge number of people right now.

Aside from the individual difficulties, there's a broader issue of what unpaid placements could mean for the psychology profession. The number of psychologists in Australia is only meeting 35% of the federal government's psychology workforce goal. So we are currently not meeting the mental health needs of people in the community because there aren't enough psychologists available. When you make the training pathway financially inaccessible, you shrink of the very pipeline of practitioners we really need.

There's also an equity issue that is really important to me here when placements are unpaid and financially quite brutal. The people who drop out or never start are disproportionately those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, people from regional and rural areas, people with disability and those with caring responsibilities. The consequences are that we end up with a workforce that doesn't reflect the communities that's trying to serve.

So what's happening right now in Parliament and what can you do? A petition is calling on the Australian government to expand the Commonwealth Prac Payment to include psychology and allied health students, and it was recently introduced in Federal Parliament by independent MPs, David Pocock and Dr. Monique Ryan. The ask is pretty clear. It's to expand the prac payment scheme to include psychology students. And essentially it means stopping asking the next generational psychologist to subsidise the mental health system through unpaid labour.

It's worth noting that a legislative review of the Prac Payment scheme was actually scheduled for 2027 to 2028, and it is required to consider the appropriateness of expanding payments to students undertaking allied health courses. So the conversation is already baked into the legislation, we just needed to convince them that expanding it to psychology students is the right choice to make. This petition is about making sure the voices of students and the profession allowed and clear.

So what can you do? You can sign the petition. I've already done it and it felt good typing in my name and submitting my call for this. I'll put the link in the show notes and you can share it with other psychology students, with supervisors, with anybody who cares about the future of the psychology profession. And you can talk about it. I think it's important for us to talk about finances. We often keep them under wraps and don't talk about them, but the more visible this issue becomes, the harder it is to ignore.

Overall placement poverty is not inevitable. It is a policy choice, and policy can change. I really hope this episode gives you a clearer picture of what's going on and why it matters. Whether you are a student living with it right now, a registered psych, who remembers what it was like, or a supervisor who wants to support people coming through.

If you found this episode useful, please share with somebody who needs to hear it. Follow the podcast wherever you're listening so you don't miss future episodes . And if you're on Spotify, you can leave a comment right now on the episode page. I always love hearing from you.

That's a wrap, thanks for listening to Mental Work. I'm Bronwyn Milkins. Catch you next time. Bye!