MORE health graduates than ever are choosing to stay in Tamworth, boosting the city’s reputation as a positive starting point for rural medical careers.
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Final year medical and health students are preparing to sit their last exams and the University of Newcastle department of rural health is boasting their best retention rate yet.
We’re about what we can do really well, which is very positive clinical rural placement.
- Dr Jenny May
“The retention is the best we’ve had,” director of the department of rural health Dr Jenny May said.
But there’s more pieces to the puzzle of building the rural health workforce.
“The job is to ensure students and people who are of rural origin and who want to live in rural areas get that opportunity,” she said.
A university campus with scope to take students all the way through their tertiary learning could help retain medical students in rural areas, but Dr May said “positive clinical placement” is the tried and true way of keeping medicos in the regions.
“We’re about what we can do really well, which is very positive clinical rural placement,” she said.
“Because we know if [we have] these guys for a year, they can get involved in the community and it’s highly likely that’s half the reason they stay.
“Do we need to have people for five years to allow that connection, well, that’s one way of doing it, but, we’re really aware it’s positive rural clinical placement.”
Dr May said what is retaining students is smaller classes and better exam outcomes.
“If you sit down with students and ask them the honest truth, many will say ‘I come hear because the training is good’,” she said.
James Wayte is set to graduate from his medicine degree and said most specialties currently require study based in the city, which he said is a hurdle to keeping clinicians regional.
“I think over time there will be more and more training options available in the country. For now, for a lot of specialities you may be thinking about, you have to go back to city to do your training,” he said.
The graduating students who are looking to stay in Tamworth beyond their degrees, agreed they hadn’t missed out for choosing the city and spoke highly of ‘one-on-one learning experiences’.
Physiotherapy student Jess Gardner said she was able to be more involved in the community.
“It gets you face-to-face with the community so it’s not just you in the hospital and then you go home,” she said.
Fifth-year medical student Sam Hume thought many cohorts in his degree were “aware the clinical experience and teaching you have in the rural sites is more one-on-one and better”, but said the main challenge was drawing urban students away from their metropolitan bases.