Geraldton Health Campus is preparing to welcome medical interns for the first time.
Five medical interns will work at the Midwest hospital and WA Country Health Service Executive Director of Medical Services Dr Andrew Jamieson said the health service would directly employ first-year, post-graduate doctors.
"This is the start of a program whereby Geraldton will be directly implicated in training doctors, right from the start of their career," he said.
"It means that the same doctors will stay at Geraldton hospital [for] a whole year.
"They will get to know the hospital, they'll get to know the community, they will put down roots hopefully in Geraldton.
"What we really want to do is make sure that our doctors who work in the country … really make that commitment to providing care to country people."
Dr Jamieson said Geraldton's hospital had recently been approved as a facility which could employ doctors from the moment they were qualified.
He said accreditation required stable medical services in areas such as emergency care, surgical, paediatric, and mental health which could ensure interns were trained well.
"As an intern, doctors are at the start of their career and there is a fair amount of supervision and career development that happens as their career develops," he said.
"Geraldton is now ideally placed to be able to provide that supervision and career development to these doctors."
He was "confident" there was adequate supervision for the interns, despite Geraldton hospital's shortage of medical and nursing staff.
"Geraldton hospital has worked particularly hard to make sure that they have got the right balance of medical staffing," he said.
Hope to fill doctor shortage
Dr Jamieson said the intern program was intended to help regions gain doctors trained in country work.
"Having the interns on board is the start of a process that we like to call 'growing our own', instead of relying on doctors being processed through the big hospitals in Perth."
He said it was a step towards filling the doctor shortage gaps in regional and rural areas.
"The [Rural Clinical School of WA] has demonstrated success that when students do their training in the country they tend to return to the country to work," he said.
"Doctors who do their internship and work as perhaps more junior doctors, generally, in our hospitals tend to put down roots in communities.
"It is invigorating for the whole health service to have these young doctors working with us."
