GVRTH Alpine medicine showcase attracts more doctors to North East

The Goulburn Valley Regional Training Hub, which aims to attract medical professionals to the North East by offering training, career development and networking events, coordinated the alpine medicine showcase for 35 students.

First-year medicine student Timothy Duff said the program showed him the opportunities available to follow a rural generalist pathway in the region.

"I've always been passionate about rural healthcare before entering medicine, but what this particular weekend did for me is really reinforce the area in Victoria I want to work, definitely up in the North East and the sorts of specialty training I want to look at, that being mostly trauma and emergency with a bit of GP work as well," he said.

"I'm definitely really keen on Mount Beauty, I think it's an awesome area with lots to do and really really interesting medicine as well."

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The program took the students on a tour of Falls Creek Medical Centre and the Falls Creek Ski Patrol team gave the students a demonstration of a patients journey from injury to emergency treatment.

North East emergency medicine specialists and rural generalists also guided students through hands-on sessions on trauma, analgesia, concussion and fractures and shared their own training journeys with the students to illustrate different career pathways and described what their work and home life looked like.

Goulburn Valley Regional Training Hub manager Shane Boyer said the program was another way of attracting medical professionals to the regions where they were desperately needed.

"The key point we were trying to make was to inspire these students to stay in the region and to show them what type of medical careers there are in the region, not just in your bigger centres, like Shepparton and Wangaratta and Albury-Wodonga, for example," he said.

Mr Boyer said almost all of the medicine students would be more inclined to train or work regionally after the program.

"I'm meeting with at least five or six of those students over the next seven days to talk to them about their training pathways," he said.

"Now they're inspired to look at what different disciplines they want to do and plot their career pathway and training pathways out from that - the impact has shown that their career pathways and training pathways can be done in the region."

The training hub offers a range of other programs throughout the year for medical professionals.

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