Auckland medical students benefit in the regions

Auckland medical students benefit in the regions

Media Release - University of Auckland

16 November 2016

Practicing medicine in the regions and rural areas of the upper North Island was a memorable experience for most of the 213 University of Auckland medical students due to graduate on Friday. [18 November]

The University’s medical programme includes regional placements for fourth, fifth and sixth-year students with district hospital boards in Northland, Taranaki, and the Bay of Plenty. These provide a different experience from their previous training at major hospitals such as Auckland City, Middlemore and Waikato.

Medical students also train with GPs and at medical centres in rural areas throughout the upper North Island – from Taupo north.

“Despite these students attending a top-rated international university and receiving high-quality training in medicine based at Auckland, they also have the opportunity to experience first-hand, practising medicine in the regions and rural areas,” says the Dean of Auckland’s Medical School, Professor John Fraser. (Dean of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland).

Placements on the Pūkawakawa programme based at Whangarei Hospital are hosted by the Northland District Health Board and have been underway for nearly a decade.

These nine month regional placements include students training in a small hospital at a rural service town such as Kaitaia, Kawakawa, Rawene or Dargaville, in Northland.

Bay of Plenty placements include working in general practice and primary health, and at Whakatane or Tauranga Hospitals. At Whakatane there is a multi-disciplinary approach with teams of students that include nursing, medical and pharmacy trainees.

Taranaki is another regional base for medical students from Auckland Medical School on placement with students training at Taranaki Hospital in New Plymouth or in the much smaller Hawera Hospital.

Many of these regional placements have given students their first experience of living and working in small towns in New Zealand.

As a result of this, some of them opt to work in the regions and one of the main reasons is the more relaxed and affordable lifestyle offered in these areas.

Soon to graduate, medical student Makere Beale was born and raised in Gisborne and attended a country school during her primary years before attending one of the high schools in town.

She has cultural ties to the East Coast (Ngāti Porou) and the Eastern Bay of Plenty (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) and spent a lot of time in these rural areas while she was growing up.

In Makere’s fifth year of medical training at University of Auckland, she was part of the Pūkawakawa programme at Whangarei Hospital from January to October 2015.

“During this time I spent six weeks at Bay of Islands Hospital in Kawakawa doing a mixture of general practice and rural hospital medicine,” says Makere. “Later in the year I also had the opportunity to do a five week placement at Gisborne Hospital working in the emergency department.”

This year she was one of the trainee interns in the first cohort at Taranaki Base Hospital in New Plymouth.

“I was there from February to September 2016 followed by a six week rural general practice placement at Te Whānau-ā-Apanui Health Centre in Te Kaha.

Now Makere has a job starting soon at Gisborne Hospital for her first post-graduate year and plans to stay there for two years.

“I hope to continue to work in regional hospitals gaining experience towards specialty training,” she says. “Doing placements in Gisborne and Te Kaha has been a major highlight for me as it gave me the opportunity to work within my own community and with my own people.”

“The key difference working in rural settings compared with main centres is the lack of a hierarchy,” says Makere. “Being a team player is essential for working in rural centres and the lack of a hierarchy allows for better cohesion across disciplines and expertise levels.

“The smaller staff and student numbers in rural centres also allows for more hands on learning and one-on-one teaching compared with the main centres,” she says. “My experiences during rural and regional placements have confirmed my desire to work and live in rural areas.”

Another student, due to graduate this month, is Sara Samuelu, originally from Lower Hutt.
Sara was another student who trained on the 2015 Northland Pūkawakawa programme and in New Plymouth at Taranaki Hospital this year.

“I really enjoyed the smaller hospitals because they were welcoming and very keen to get medical students involved as a valued member of the team,” she says. “I was able to get to know hospital staff over the year, because our wards were much smaller.

“As students, there would often only be one or two of us on the ward at a time, so patients were never saturated with medical students,” says Sara.

She says the lifestyle is also unparalleled, the general cost of living is much cheaper than in bigger cities, and it's an opportunity to explore a new place that you may have never been to before.

“Patients that would usually be admitted directly to subspecialist services in a bigger hospital would initially be managed under a generalist service [in smaller centres],” says Sara.

“This provided a greater range of patient presentations and exposure to managing more complex medical issues.

“This meant that doctors had to be very good generalists within their own field, and because of the smaller teams, we worked a lot closer with consultants and senior house surgeons,” she says.

Sara is hoping to secure a job at Wairau Hospital in Blenheim next year and continuing to train in rural hospital medicine and as a rural GP.

ENDS

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