School students pushed to pursue healthcare careers amid new hospital build

Ahead of the projected completion of the new Toowoomba Hospital by 2027, industry leaders in health met with school students on Friday to encourage their pursuit of healthcare careers.

Health industry leaders are pushing for school students to pursue a career in healthcare ahead of the completion of Toowoomba’s new hospital to ensure a viable workforce.

Around 70 students attended the TSBE Health Industry Showcase event with some of the region’s leading industry leaders in health on Friday to hear about what it’s like to work in a career in the respective field.

With the state government’s $1.3 billion investment into the city’s new hospital, this will require a significant increase in the health workforce to fill a number of new job positions once the hospital is projected to be complete by 2027.

Currently, more than 13,000 hospital and health staff contribute to Toowoomba’s health system, which accounts for around 15 per cent of jobs in the region.

Darling Downs Health’s chief executive Annette Scott said they are currently working on the modelling for what the workforce numbers will need to be once the hospital is built.

“With the pandemic, we closed our borders and we really appreciated how much we relied on mobility across Australia to draw in a health workforce,” she said.

“We also realised how much we rely on an international health workforce.”

There are 133 advertised job vacancies for medical practitioners and nurses as of September 9, data from the Regional Australia Institute shows.

However, Ms Scott said she is “totally confident” they will have the capabilities to train incoming health and hospital staff, and provide the pathways to pipeline people into these careers.

Artist impressions of the new Toowoomba Hospital at the site of the old Baillie Henderson Hospital site. Photo: Supplied.

The question of what will happen to the Toowoomba Hospital in the CBD and Baillie Henderson Hospital remains uncertain, however.

Ms Scott said they will keep the CBD hospital as a health precinct with undoubtedly some training facilities, but are working out whether to expand training facilities on the Baillie campus as well.

“Part of the modelling now is, will we grow both or will we start to concentrate on one area of one site only for which we will expand our training and education capacity,” she said.

Toowoomba and Surat Basin Enterprise’s chief executive Ali Davenport said it’s incredibly important that young people can see health as a great opportunity to find work.

“We need to make sure that we‘ve got a continual pipeline of people that want to come to work in our spaces,” she said.