An array of nurses have been recruited as a result of overseas recruitment efforts by Albury Wodonga Health managers, the service's chief executive says.
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Bill Appleby said in-house missions to lure professionals from Canada, Ireland and New Zealand had been successful.
"Over the last three months we've sent our own HR team over to Toronto, to Dublin and to Auckland and we've recruited over 70 staff, mainly nurses, who will come over here over the next 12 months for a period of five years," Mr Appleby said.
He said it was a short-term solution to recruit foreign nurses, but it was hoped some would blend permanently into the community.
"We want people to come out here and make the Albury-Wodonga region their home," Mr Appleby said.
"A number of them are young people with partners and their partners will also be coming out here, so ... absolutely we would like them to stay and we're going to be working hard to make it very sticky here, so the value proposition is that they'll want to stay in rural and regional Australia."
Mr Appleby said other measures to bolster staff numbers included encouraging additional hours from existing personnel, promoting greater completion of year 12 and the steering of Border teenagers into health-related courses and tapping into tertiary know-how in the Twin Cities.
To keep morale up among existing employees, Mr Appleby pointed to excellence in service awards now in their second year, a Christmas decoration competition and video done to the song Footloose.
"There are lots of small things that we do and we obviously receive feedback through our people matters survey that we do annually around how our staff are experiencing (work)," he said.
"The last 12 months we've spent a lot of time developing 180 leaders across the organisation, so we've co-designed the behaviours that we want to see in our organisation, because we know people don't leave organisations, they leave their leaders.
"If we've got quality leadership happening across our 24 sites, we're more likely that staff are going to come to work, they're are going to feel respected, they're going to feel engaged, they're going to be enthusiastic, they're going to feel safe.
"And if they're feeling that they're going to deliver great patient care."
