Charleville

I’m James, I’m the senior physio out here at Charleville Hospital. As you can see in the background, it’s a beautiful hospital and a beautiful place to work. I’ve been out here for about three months now, after being at PA in Brisbane for a few years.

Working, and even having a placement in these areas, probably find that you do gain confidence a lot quicker than if you were on a certain ward in a big hospital, just because you’ve got the opportunities there to learn.

Charleville is one of the most welcoming, outback towns in Queensland. It’s home to the Bilby Centre, the Cosmos Centre, the Royal Flying Doctors were established out there.

What drew me out here was just the lifestyle. It’s a great place to be. You get to work in a small, close-knit team. Everyone knows who you are. The Director of the hospital knows your name. I walk down the street on a Saturday morning, go get my coffee. I know the person who’s making it for me, I know the guy sitting outside the shop and there’s a patient I’m treating across the road walking better because I saw them two days before. I think that’s pretty special.

The big part of living in these communities as people often think with health professionals, that we come in, we come here for six months, do our job and then we leave. I think when the community actually see that we’re prepared to stick around and stay, all of the sudden it changes and they want you to be a part of the community and feel like you belong here. It’s just very, very rewarding.

Why I enjoy working at Charleville, you get to see everything, everything comes through the door. Over here we get lots of muscular skeletal, the patient numbers are always nice and busy, gives you plenty of hands-on experience. But that one-to-one interaction also gives you more scope to try and grow and develop what you are doing with your practice.

From a more junior point in our career out here, we are exposed to the service delivery side of things, and resource development and quality improvement activities, which in bigger hospitals you often have to be in the really senior positions to do and see a lot of that sort of thing. Which in terms of career progression down the track, is a big step.

Once a month we get to fly out with RFDS, in this awesome aircraft here, and go out and service some of the most rural and remote parts of Queensland. That’s something I definitely never would have done in the city or PA where I’ve come from previously.

We are very very lucky out here in remote areas with the services that we have and resources we have in place for students. I think we see that there is a need, that we want to develop that next group of remote clinicians, so we want to give them the best opportunity that they can have while they are out here. And then there is a lot of funding going towards that as well because that’s been recognised. So here in Charleville we’ve got this great SQRH building that we are in at the moment, that’s got your simulation lab, you can basically do anything, get all your experiences in here. SQRH have the student housing, so there’s always other students around, so there’s that support as well. It’s not like you’ve got to come out here and pay a lot of money to stay in a motel or anything. In terms of for students, we’re really set up with resources.

The experiences that students continue to have and continue to report on, is that Charleville is a place they want to return to, to practice as health professionals.

The lifestyle out here other than work, there’s a great sporting culture, there’s a great social life, there’s lots of young families and it’s definitely something that I’d considered myself being out here long term and I know there’s a lot of people out here that are in the same position.

If you’re thinking of coming for a remote placement, out here like Charleville, do it. You won’t regret it. If you’re prepared to make the most of it and be a part of the community, then you will definitely enjoy it.