OPINION – ANNE WEBSTER
But it continues to be a real challenge, due to workforce shortages in primary, specialist and allied health.
We are fortunate to have skilled, dedicated professionals in the Mallee who provide excellent health care.
In Mildura, Monash University provides postgraduate training for medical students in various stages of their training. But there is currently no pathway for secondary students to begin undergraduate medical training in Mildura.
Talented secondary students who wish to train in medicine must relocate and, frequently, we lose these students forever. This profoundly affects workforce and systematises the maldistribution of the medical workforce.
Melbourne has one doctor to 900 patients, but in Mallee there are many towns where there is one doctor to several thousand patients. It is absolutely untenable.
I have relentlessly advocated change since I stepped into office.
We need to build and preserve our medical workforce in the regions.
We lose some of our best and brightest students because we don’t yet have a streamlined undergraduate-to-postgraduate training program. We need a local pipeline of medical training from secondary to tertiary completion.
I have worked extensively in my three years in office with the universities and the five federal ministers responsible for health and education – Ministers Hunt, Gillespie, Coulton, Tehan and Tudge – to secure an undergraduate biomedical course with wet lab at La Trobe University in Mildura and to increase the Commonwealth supported places. This is the vital first step to the bigger picture of making Mildura an independent tristate health precinct with end-to-end medical degrees.
One of the major wins has been the implementation of the HELP debt relief for doctors and nurse practitioners who stay to work in the bush.
My end game is a tristate tertiary training and private and public hospital sector. People across Sunraysia deserve nothing less.
