The Burnet Institute is a non-profit organisation that is associated with The Alfred Hospital here in Melbourne, Australia. The Institute’s goal is to achieve better health for poor and vulnerable communities in Australia and internationally through research, education and public health. Some of the projects that they are involved in are street level activities such as the Burnet Bus.
Burnet Bus was a final year project at RMIT. A group of us, media students, came into this project with no knowledge of the subject and industry. We didn’t really understand what they did and how important their work was.
The Burnet Bus is a mobile project which regularly and periodicity visit the streets of Melbourne. This is done across variation of locations, in order to study the overall drug use, trends and patterns in Victoria. This information aims to draw a picture the long-term health effects of drug use and helps to inform further study, generate better funding and ultimately create better government policy on the issue of drugs within our communities.
The people in this project are real and their stories are real too. Together, our group successfully put a human side to drug addiction and use – and not what you’ll hear, wrapped up in 30 seconds, on the daily 6pm news.
This project still stands strong today, and is one my greater accomplishments as a producer.