Ben died and was revived numerous times on Monday – Ben the simulation mannequin, that is.
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He was in the capable hands of 20 new interns at Albury-Wodonga Health undertaking their orientation training before they hit the hospital floors next week.
Clinical training director Heather Chaffey said the profile of the group had changed this year.
“We used to have interns rotating from Western Health in Melbourne,” she said.
“We’ve dropped that for 2017 and we have directly recruited five so they are now coming for two years instead of a three-month rotation.”
Dr Chaffey said a number of junior doctors enjoyed getting a wider exposure to cases at AWH.
“If you do a medical and surgical term in the city, you may be doing a highly specific medical term such as respiratory or hematological term,” she said.
“When you come to Albury-Wodonga you do a general medical term – you get exposure to all of it.
“Studies have shown that if you train and put effort into rural doctors who have lived in rural areas, they will then come back to rural areas and become specialists and general practitioners.”
This is true for Jindera’s Dave Phelps, who aspires to work on the Border.
“Rural general practice is a very wide scope,” he said.
“It’s not just seeing patients in the clinic – you’ve got urgent things that come in and you do a lot of different things at a small hospital.”
Dr Chaffey said interns needed to be prepared for any situation, like the basic life support administration simulated on Monday.
“When a patient is critically unwell in a hospital, we teach them what to do and how to do it,” she said.
“We can provide a lot of their junior training levels, but eventually most will have to spend some time in a tertiary institution.
“As an organisation, we’re moving towards being able to train all of them fully, but that’s certainly some years down the track yet.”
Intern Archie Collyer, originally from Bright, was looking forward to getting one step closer to a career in anaesthetics.
“At Albury we’ll have registrars above us and consultants, but we’ll be looking after patients most of the time,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to a challenge of putting our knowledge to the test.”
