A remote opportunity

One of the things that became very obvious to me while I was on placement was that women's health in rural and remote areas is almost regarded as a luxury. There is often reduced availability of medical care specifically aimed at women, including less access to female GPs who can be harder to come across in those remote places.

The women themselves who live out in these areas often have an outdoors physical lifestyle that makes them as ‘tough as nails’, meaning that they tend to not pay much attention to their health even when they really should. The emphasis on their own self-care is not so pronounced; they are busy raising cattle and wrestling bulls, or running a farm, for example. There is also a significant indigenous female population who tend to not want to make a fuss, and who do not feel comfortable talking about their health problems to a stranger.

And of course, there are also issues of having access to transport. You may have to travel hundreds of kilometres into town to see a healthcare professional or try your luck catching a bus that may not even go anywhere near your home. If the model of medical care is to only be available for appointments on, say, Tuesday mornings at 8am, then that model is not serving anyone particularly well, especially when women might also have to arrange for childcare and things like that.

So, there is still a lot about women's health in these rural and remote areas that needs to be addressed. It needs to be both more equitable and culturally aware. Health professionals can be at risk of becoming very focused on the clinical aspects of their work, but I am a firm believer that the whole person is what is most important, and not just what their medical problem or issue is. That is, the social and emotional needs of a patient also need to be addressed in addition to their health concerns.

Where do you see yourself after graduating?

I want to stay in the rural and remote regions, ideally going back to the Central West region where I did my placement which includes the outback towns of Longreach, Barcaldine and Blackall.

I’ve applied for the Queensland Health graduate program for that region, which is a 12-month supported program. But regardless of whether I get into that graduate program or not, I'm still going to graduate as a Registered Nurse and nobody can take that away from me. I can still apply for registered nurse positions in GP clinics and other primary health services, and after six months experience then join the casual pool of hospital-based nursing.

I absolutely love the community spirit you can feel in these places. Within three days of arriving in Blackall, I was being greeted in the street by name; It’s the kind of place where the person you treat today might be serving you fish and chips tomorrow! As soon as I moved in, our neighbour was bringing over scones and pumpkins and I would then bring over pumpkin soup in return.

There's also so much opportunity in a rural or remote setting to gain more clinical skills, just out of necessity. Whereas in a major tertiary hospital, for example, if you want blood drawn or a patient needs a cannula, you call on the phlebotomist. But in a rural setting, the nurse gets the patient ready for whatever’s needed.

When you're in a rural setting, you're dealing with so many different presentations, with patients from the entire lifespan. While on a rural placement the oldest person I treated was 99 years old and then two hours after that I was looking after a six-month old baby. And then the next day, we've got a guy that's come off his quad bike and is admitted to emergency!

You only get to be exposed to that kind of variety when you are in a rural or remote setting. As a result, it’s possible to progress to a clinical nurse role much faster. You get to call on all of your skills and knowledge, which keeps your brain constantly critically thinking. As the saying goes, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’.

I also really appreciated having more of an all-rounder role within the hospital healthcare team. I felt totally embraced as a valuable member of the team and was encouraged to participate in every aspect of a patient’s care. In a smaller team, you really rely on each other and are in constant communication with everyone. The team spirit feels almost like a family; all of the hospital staff would often get together for a barbecue or meet up for trivia night at the pub.

What are you most proud of?

Well, I’m 48, I’ve raised two children who are now young adults, and I am on track to graduate from my nursing degree at the end of this year despite a pandemic happening!

Unlike a lot of the other nursing schools, we were still able to complete all of our placements, with our practical clinics also still going ahead. The disruptions from the Covid-19 lockdown last year meant we ended up having back-to-back four solid days of hands-on workshops just after the lockdown ended, and then straight after that we started our placements. Exams also had to be delayed which meant that, for my second year of studies, we didn't really have any downtime because we were either studying, on placement or sitting our exams!