Delivering rural doctors

In 2021, the UQ Regional Training Hubs (RTHs) in Central Queensland, Wide Bay and Southern Queensland continued to nurture our medical students in career planning, navigating regional training and pathway opportunities via a suite of Generalist and Specialist resources. They also helped mentor, guide and encourage them in their quest to work rurally after graduation. In spite of the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, we extended our support and delivery of broad-ranging initiatives. In collaboration with health service and education stakeholders, we ensured our local medical workforce had access to a suite of educational opportunities and events. This included:

• Facilitating the development of medical training capacity to increase knowledge and skills transfer to 101 clinicians with clinical supervision training.
• Recruiting 47 clinicians to establish a Career Champion Program that gives new doctors the opportunity to connect with a Career Champion currently practicing in their specialty of interest; and receive information on College training programs.
• Hosting rural roadshows that engaged clinicians in our smaller rural communities to share developments in the Regional Medical Pathway, and collaborations with UQ Medical School.
• Facilitating education and training opportunities including Advanced Life Skills, Paediatrics, Cardiology and Sepsis Management Workshops.
• Running a successful Medical Career Pathways campaign that promoted the 18 specialties available within our footprint, resulting in 20,000 hits on our YouTube videos.
• Offering networking opportunities, such as welcome events, intern orientations and social mixer events; to immerse and grow doctors in our communities.

We look forward to attracting more doctors to regional hospital internships and collaborating with our partners to strengthen our medical workforce and support the Central Queensland – Wide Bay Regional Medical Pathway and Darling Downs – South West Medical Pathway into the future.