Vicky, Mental Health Nurse Manager
My name’s Vicky Millward, and I'm a registered psychiatric nurse, and I've been working in Victoria for the last five and a half years.
So, I moved here with my wife and my two children. The service that I work for is quite unique in Victoria: we provide psychosocial rehab for clients that have an intellectual disability. I love my unit. I am very passionate about the care that we provide, and it gets me up every morning and looking forward to going to work.
In the UK, we really struggled to get out of the rental market, which we'd been in since we'd first moved into a home together. Here, we've managed to buy our own house and build our own house, which was really exciting for us. It also was very helpful that my wages were a lot more in Australia, which made a massive difference.
My work/life balance is so much better here - the weather is so much nicer here, so it's a lot easier for us to be outside. In the UK, I was working long days, which were 12-hour-plus days. Whereas here we work shorter shifts, which means I can be at a home in either the morning to get my children ready for school, or I can be at home in the evenings to get them ready for bed. My kids, they love life here. They have Australian accents now, they play Aussie sports, and they are very settled in school.
Seven years on, I'm so glad that we took a chance to just move over to Australia. We are so settled, and so happy here.
Yeah, I couldn't have asked for anything more.
