The Department of Health is to extend a rural health workforce program that enables nursing and dental students, and trainee doctors to train in regional and rural areas.
Announced by Minister for Regional Health, Dr David Gillespie, the Department’s Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training (RHMT) Program is to be extended for a further three years.
Dr Gillespie said the 20-year-old Program provided high-quality clinical rural training experiences for students in a range of career paths, including GPs, nurses, dentists and allied health professionals.
“The Program has supported more than 31,000 short-term to year-long rural medical placements over the past five years,” Dr Gillespie said.
He said that, before the Department’s intervention to create a university-led rural training network, most of the training across health disciplines was concentrated in major metropolitan teaching hospitals.
“Students had limited exposure to the delivery of primary care or to more generalist models of providing health services and care to rural communities, which made it more difficult for people to study and train in our regions, and in turn choose to practice out of the major cities,” Dr Gillespie said.
“With three out of every 10 medical and nursing students now of rural origin, it’s imperative to ensure students can train in the regions, where they are offered high-quality and hands-on training.”
The Minister said the RHMT Program demonstrated that universities could be supported to deliver tertiary-level teaching and training to health students in regional and rural settings to an equivalent or higher standard than that of metropolitan settings.
