Keeping it rural: Post-COVID medical graduates wedded to staying in the country

In 2023, nearly 60% of the interns at the Bendigo Hospital will be students who studied in the medical education programs at Monash Rural Health – Bendigo, a great indicator that medical students who train in regional Victoria will continue to learn and practise in the bush as well.

But this post-COVID cohort is more than just wedded to staying in the country. They’ve studied under extremely challenging circumstances, having completed their clinical training years in the cauldron of a pandemic.

With the support of the senior administration at Bendigo Health, medical students in Bendigo remained on uninterrupted clinical placements, while most other clinical teaching sites across Victoria restricted or cancelled access to wards and clinics during the height of the pandemic.

While medical students in Melbourne spent much of 2020-2021 learning via Zoom, in the regions where the lockdown restrictions were less harsh, medical students were called on to help out in ways their predecessors could only dream of – administering vaccinations, assisting when emergency departments were struggling, working in remote home monitoring of acute COVID patients in the community, or just holding the hands of someone as they passed away because their families couldn’t visit them in hospital.

Heeding the call

Historically, medical students have fronted-up when needed. In 1918, some medical students graduated early to help fight the raging Spanish flu.

In 1952, medical students in Denmark helped provide polio patients with round-the-clock manual ventilation. In the 1980s, doctors in training were thrust into the burgeoning AIDS epidemic.

This pandemic, however, has been longer – and it’s not over yet – and tougher than anything so far experienced.

What it did create is the next generation of junior doctors who may be more experienced, more empathetic, and more ready for practice than any cohort before them.

The lucky medical students – and many of them recognise that luck – who spent the pandemic years studying in rural and regional hospitals worked at the coalface, not just following junior and senior doctors around the wards observing, but hands-on providing healthcare with real patient outcomes.

Undergraduate education is only half the story

The challenge now is to provide an environment for comprehensive postgraduate training in rural and regional areas so that the graduates of 2022 can see a clear path to general and specialist roles without the need to return to large metropolitan centres to access the full range of experiences and education they require to become the GPs and specialists of the future.