Orange

I told the students that if they come to the school of rural health they will have a great learning experience, they'll see a fascinating array of general medicine, surgery, they'll have very close ties with their tutors and their supervisors, they'll have the opportunity to do outreach and they'll also find themselves in a very supportive community and I think that the experience they’ll have here is a great experience in general medicine, general surgery and in the subspecialty areas as well and its associated with the opportunity to live in a community for a year and to bond with that community as well, so I think it's a totally unique experience of we're offering here.

I've been a student at Orange hospital for over a year before I became an intern and before that I'd been a student in Dubbo both with the school of rural health I absolutely loved living here and didn't really ever want to move back to Sydney so that's probably the main reason I applied. You have amazing experiences here that you don't get an opportunity to have in Sydney, so you get to go on outreach clinics you get to see a lot more sort of advanced pathology, I really like the fact that is an intern I'm exposed to a lot of general medicines so you know general surgical presentations, general medical presentations and I think that's really good training regardless of what specialty you end up going into.

I think one of the barriers that stops people coming out here as a student is that there's a lot of misconception in Sydney that you'll miss out on something by not spending a year in Sydney or that you'll be disadvantaged in terms of getting into training programs later on. That's really not the case, usually you get more out of being here than you do out of having another year in Sydney,  plus in my experience the people that have been in years ahead of me, have actually had better chances of getting into training programs in Sydney and quite competitive jobs than people that have done their internships in big teaching hospitals.

So I was like a student here as a fourth-year student so a couple of months at the end of the year and came back after elective. I very, very much enjoyed Orange mainly because of the support that I got from fellow students and also the other Doctors. I think the staff here have been fantastic both at the school of rural health and within the hospital , they see the potential for all the students coming through to be a very, very valuable part of the Doctor network into the future.

I think just trying that community feel that you don't get in Sydney is really good for studying and for working, it's a lot easier to get to know people to form relationships and to get the benefits of having those relationships in terms of, yeah, being in theater and it's patient contact and that kind of thing.  Well yesterday I scrubbed in and assisted on a caesarean so I helped deliver a baby for the first time that was very exciting. I've been first assistant in theatre, I've travelled to the rural communities and helped with clinics in the smaller country towns, I've done my own minor procedures which is very exciting when I was on my community term.

So it's probably the best year of uni really I came out here in third year, this is the hospital that I'm the most familiar with. I lived in the student accommodation with 14 other students, we all spend time together we all went pub together we all played footy for the same team and we went to uni and had a great time learning with really good teachers and a really sort of cohesive environment. Well I think it certainly was an advantage,  I mean it's in the practical sense it's good to study at a hospital where you work the first week here I knew where to find everything I knew all the bosses and I settled in a lot quicker than people who had to come from other hospitals. I think in a wider sense I was prepared by going to school of rural health because it's a great place to learn to be an intern, the teaching is much more practical, it's a lot more hands-on and it's certainly a lot more consultant on student and student on registrar type of time, so the teaching is of a higher level and it allows you to move into the role with ease especially doing your print term here, you sort of take over those responsibilities one at a time.

G'day my name is Pip Southpaw and welcome to Charles Sturt University, we are so glad you're here. I'm part of the Three Rivers University Department of rural health team at Charles Sturt. Our objective is to improve the recruitment and retention of health professionals in rural and remote Australia and that means you.

We are based at Charles Sturt University in the Riverina and the Central West regions of New South Wales. We have five major sites across our regional footprint in Albury, Dubbo, Griffith, Orange and Wagga Wagga. Our footprint overlaps with the Roger a nation area which has been described as the land of the three rivers. The Womble or the Macquarie, the Calare, the Lachlan and the Murrumbidgee. These places are our hometowns and we are so passionate about you being able to see the very best of rural New South Wales and the very best of rural health while you study with us.

Charles Sturt we support nursing, midwifery, dental and allied health students in many ways, including undertaking research within our communities. Research that informs our practice and has real and tangible effects for rural health.

Hi I'm Sarah Hyde and I lead a team of clinical educators who are lecturers in rural health. There are six of us located right across the footprint. We are here to maximise your opportunities to participate in effective and high-quality clinical training placements for nursing, midwifery, dentistry and allied health within the three rivers UDRH footprint. As part of your workplace learning support, we also offer placement grants and accommodation subsidies to help you live study and work in our local rural area. We have a range of online modules that you can also complete to help you prepare for workplace learning and help you get the most out of these opportunities. We really encourage you to check them out on our website.

Hi my name is Nikki Royle and I'm proud Wiradjuri woman. I work with Three Rivers deadly indigenous health success team and we provide opportunities for the aspirations and success of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to become health professionals. We will walk with you on your journey in health as we all collaborate to do our part in closing the gap. We know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health professionals are key influencers in building cultural awareness in effective rural health care teams.

Three Rivers UDR is committed to creating a safe cultural learning environment that respects, acknowledges and recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders history and cultural identity. We'd love you to join the Charles Sturt Rural Health Club, rule health positive where you can connect with other health students across all the campuses and the online community. The club will give you access to professional development and training as well as professional networks, so get involved and get connected you are the next generation of health professionals. You can check out the club's Facebook page - at rural health positive. At Three Rivers UDRH we are all about connection. Connecting with students, connecting students to our industry and connecting students with each other. So follow us on social media, sign up for our monthly newsletter or visit our website  - Three Rivers dot CSU edu dot au.

Get in touch to learn more about us, start a conversation or apply for one of our wide range of scholarships. I congratulate you on taking the next step in your rural health career and we just can't wait to see your future unfold.

It's really exciting using the modern facilities here at uni. I don't know how to describe it, wild in a sense. It's something that you would think that you would only be using in your wildest dreams.

Western Sydney University Medical School is one of the new medical schools and we chose to build world-class facilities to offer the people in southwestern Sydney but across Australia and particularly our rural Australians, an opportunity to work in the best medical school on the planet. It's something that was a goal for me I'm in terms of university preferences. We get over three and a half thousand applications every year for a hundred places, and it allows us to choose not just those that can work hard and that are bright, but those that are absolutely committed to the needs of the communities.

Western Sydney's medical course is significant in that we're clinical from day one, there's no sitting in a classroom for years and years, we get out there we get amongst the patients and we've really got a feel for what it is to be a healthcare provider in Australia.

You do get those opportunities to be hands on from the very beginning and that's something that's quite rare. The course of medicine here at Western Sydney University includes the key elements of the basic sciences and that really means anatomy and biochemistry and molecular studies, but we also do population-based studies so that's understanding broadly what the populations needs are. We look at the professional development and the characteristics of what makes a great,kind and confidential doctor and we also teach clinical skills which underpin everyday practice in medicine.

Well we think it's great that students have got this opportunity to experience medical practice in a community setting, that's where most of the ill health happens that doesn't happen in the teaching hospitals that happens in the community. Medical practitioners don't work in isolation, we work as part of a team experiencing things together. Seeing teams operate at close quarters is a valuable experience that they wouldn't get otherwise. In interdisciplinary events you learn how the different disciplines actually work together, it's such a fast-paced high stress environment, you know you learned that you really do need to keep your cool in those situations and go through the proper procedures in order to ensure that the patient stays alive.

Some of the clinical training is occurring as far and apart as Lismore Bathurst and out to Broken Hill and down to Albury you might start at Campbelltown but you could end up anywhere in one of 47 sites across New South Wales. Good research next to good clinical training in medicine brings the brightest and best to work in your area, but it also allows us to continually improve the quality of the care that we give. Studying medicine is obviously quite challenging at times,but with the staff and the amazing facilities we have and all the students here at Western Sydney, it's just really helped ensure that my level of motivation is always up there and I don't forget why I came here in the first place to study medicine.

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