Student clinical placements

At Wide Bay Hospital and Health Service, we’re partnering with CQU so that we can put together a group of students, and we have agreed to place them for the entirety of their second and third year placements.  This will enable us to offer some continuity with placements and work to our students’ strengths and work towards their personal nursing goals. This will enable the student group to get to know us as an organisation, our clientele, our specific health challenges that are faced by our clientele, and become more familiar with our processes and policies as they progress through their study.

At Wide Bay Hospital and Health Service, we have 11 facilities: Bundaberg Hospital, Maryborough Hospital and Hervey Bay Hospital, and 8 rural facilities that are smaller and in our rural towns not far from Bundaberg and Maryborough.  We can offer a variety of specialities, from intensive care, to paediatrics, operating theatre, department of emergency, renal, along with community components and of course mental health.

As well as the speciality areas, the medical, surgical and rehabilitation areas also offer fantastic opportunities for students.  We’ve included a little bit more information in this video about the opportunities and experience that can be gained at our rural facilities also.

In my role as Clinical Placement Coordinator, I am the contact person for this initiative and also an extra contact person for the students while they’re on placement and while they’re considering their future nursing career and planning ahead.

This is starting my third year as nursing.  I graduated from CQU in 2016.  During my placements with CQU, I did a variety of placements.  For practical reasons, I asked for my final placement to be at Gin Gin because it’s only 20 minutes from my house, and I did my final 6 weeks placement there and absolutely fell in love with rural nursing; that helped shape where I wanted to be now.  I did my graduate year with Gin Gin and that was amazing, because rural nursing… you get to do everything and you have so many more opportunities than you do… not necessarily in hospitals, but you get to use a broad range of the skills that you learn while you’re at university.

Rural nurses are very resilient.  They’re also very broad in what they know, so they are great educators.  They want you there.  They want to be able to give you support and pass on their knowledge and skills.  They help you with your clinical reasoning because that’s what they do every day. For medical students who go to some of these places as well, so you even get that broader sense of, with the student in another discipline, that’s at the same stage as you, and you get to forge some relationships.  So it’s a wonderful opportunity.

In partnership with CQU and Wide Bay Hospital and Health Service, this initiative is strongly supported by Fiona Sewell, our Executive Director of Nursing, and is seen as a strategy to effectively meet the anticipated growth across the HHS into the future.

What an exciting opportunity it is for you to come and work for the Wide Bay HHS and do the remaining 2 years of your clinical placement here. You can grow and develop in a place where you feel valued and cared for.  You’ll understand the processes, the paperwork, documentation, and be able to feel like you’re part of our team.  So, I really encourage you to apply for one of these positions, grow and develop and learn with us, knowing that in 5 to 10 years’ time, we’ll be developing a new hospital, and you may well be the future leaders of that hospital.