From her seaside town 132 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, Gabby O'Connor was travelling hours each day to attend university placements as a student nurse.
The closest nursing school to the Wonthaggi local was more than an hour away, in Berwick — but with no hospital campuses in the Bass Coast region, Ms O'Connor, 25, had to drive to the peninsula for training.
She said she was often too tired to study when she got back home, and that it was expensive to commute.
"Obviously you're not getting paid for your placement so it's an extra cost for travel," she said.
Wonthaggi Hospital will soon take on nursing students and become a Federation University hospital campus.
Ms O'Connor said she would have stayed in the region if that had been the case while she was studying.
Instead, she relocated to Melbourne for two years after finishing her degree, because there were limited opportunities for graduate nurses in the Bass Coast area.
Ms O'Connor has since moved back to her home town and works as an undergraduate coordinator at Wonthaggi Hospital.
"I wish I had that resource when I was studying, because we do have a lot of local students," she said.
"A lot of them are also parents or they have other commitments — they might not be able to travel to Melbourne to do their placements and their studies."
Local work placement in Gippsland
Bass Coast Health will host 20 first-year nursing students at Wonthaggi Hospital from March this year.
Ms O'Connor, who has a 17-month-old baby, says the program will support students who are parents or need to study nearby for other reason.
"You think of shift times — they don't always match up with childcare, so you have to rely heavily on your support system around you," she said.
"So having a local placement will help the local students immensely, especially with school pick-up and drop-offs and things [that] can be quite challenging."
The hospital hopes students can complete the three-year degree on its campus.
It aims to have 60 students by 2025 and has set a goal of employing 20 local graduates by 2026.
State data shows the number of nurses and midwives who are registered but not practising has increased by 85 per cent in the five years to 2021.
Workforce shortages
Bass Coast Health learning and development acting co-manager Mandie Heffernan says she hopes the program will provide an incentive for students to work in the region.
"It's part of a bigger workforce strategy that we've got to target our local workforce, where we've obviously got workforce shortages," she said.
"We're looking at creative ways that we can entice people back into healthcare and take away some of those barriers that come with nursing studies."
Ms Heffernan said many undergraduate nursing students were mature-age and had children, or worked in the Bass Coast region.
This made it more difficult for these students to travel to hospitals in other areas as part of their degree.
"We're hoping that will entice people to stay here and to be able to study locally," Ms Heffernan said.
"[It's] making it a little bit more of an attractive prospect as opposed to driving long periods of time."
The hospital offers a range of services, including maternal and child health, emergency treatment, general medicine and specialist radiology and imaging.
Ms Heffernan hopes that graduates who are employed at the hospital will move into postgraduate study to acquire a specialisation in these areas.
"Our hospital is growing all the time [and] the complexities of our patients and the acuity of our patients are growing all the time," she said.
"We're looking at ways that we can train staff so that we can keep our patients local to us — as opposed to sending them to Melbourne.
The hospital has staffing shortages in more complex nursing areas, Ms Heffernan, such as theatre nurses.
"So [we're] looking at ways and hoping to attract these types of nurses to our organisation," she said.
'Successful' staff retention
Rural Doctors Association of Victoria's Rob Phair said it was important for staff recruitment to have healthcare students trained in regional and rural areas.
He said studies found healthcare workers from rural areas who underwent long periods of training in rural areas were more likely to continue working in the area.
"Whether it's trainee nurses, trainee doctors, or trainee physios, you ideally get as many students as possible from the local area to give them the best possible opportunities," Dr Phair said.
He said trainee health workers, in regional and rural areas, should have "as little time as possible" in Melbourne or highly populated regional cities.
"What we want them to do is to be focused on the way we work in rural areas," he said.
Dr Phair says students from rural or regional areas have important social connections and understand the value of small communities.
"A more successful strategy is to recruit students from a rural background into training programs," he said.
"They've got those connections — it's what they grew up with, it's what they know, it's what they value."
