Training doctors in the regions from start to finish increases significantly the chances they will remain and practise in country areas once they graduate.
This is why the Murray-Darling Medical Schools Network is playing such an important role in helping to ease the chronic shortage of rural doctors.
As the years go by, and more doctors progress through the system, more will fall in love with local communities (or someone in them!) and stay.
Today is a red-letter day in the recent history of regional health provision, not just for Wagga Wagga, but for the Murrumbidgee Local Health District and wider Riverina.
Not since the official opening of the city’s Rural Referral Hospital (now Base Hospital) on 16 December 2015 has there been such an auspicious milestone achieved in local medical infrastructure.
The network boasts five medical school programs operating out of six locations in the Murray-Darling Basin: Bendigo and Mildura (through Monash University), Dubbo (University of Sydney), Orange (Charles Sturt University and Western Sydney University), Shepparton (via the University of Melbourne, including a pathway for La Trobe University students) and Wagga (University of New South Wales).
But it nearly didn’t happen.
And the tale behind Wagga’s impressive four-level, state-of-the-art facility with its magnificent glass frontage is one of intrigue, stubbornness and the most extraordinary backlash and concerted effort to prevent it.
Regional medical schools had been mooted for years but the Commonwealth and, indeed, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) were not of a mind to green light them.
Since 1999, Wagga had benefited from a clinical school, the first of 11 across Australia, under the supportive stewardship of UNSW.
They were established by then Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson at the insistence of former Member for Riverina Kay Hull who reminisced recently about their worth: “These clinical schools have changed the entire method of training for medical students,” she said.
“A key example of this is a curriculum which taught students of the many and varying rural health concerns, including a focus on farm and workplace injuries, established by Professor Mohamed Khadra, the first Director of the UNSW Clinical School in Wagga Wagga.”
My push to secure not just a rural medical school, specifically for Wagga, but also a network of schools, began early in my Parliamentary career.
Having established in 2011 Wagga’s Rural Medical School Implementation Committee, with Dr Nick Stephenson as chair, Professor Gerard Carroll, Associate Professor Adrian van der Rijt, Professor Graeme Richardson, Associate Professor Richard Harrison, Dr Louis Baggio, Mrs Hull and former State Member for Wagga Daryl Maguire (succeeded by current Wagga MP Dr Joe McGirr on the committee in June 2019), we set about to convert the clinical school into something bigger and better.
Under the original clinical school model and as was the case with the previous UNSW course, students invariably went to Sydney in the latter half of their six years … and often never came back.
On 26 February 2018, I became Nationals’ Leader and before being sworn in as Deputy Prime Minister, I had a meeting with the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
I outlined my vision to the PM after he offered me $100 million towards any regional project of my choosing.
It was like letting the genie out of the bottle and being granted a wish!
We went back and forth, debating the merits of the proposal. Prime Minister Turnbull insisted I go away to have a further think about the offer — but I already had. I had the costings, the medical school locations and how such a scheme would work. It just needed the PM’s imprimatur.
It was not until I made it clear it was the position of the National Party this scheme was a non-negotiable that the Prime Minister agreed to fund the network; and thus began something quite special you see today in the Wagga Base Hospital Precinct and elsewhere in NSW and Victoria.
What followed, however, was an extraordinary recoil.
I stand by the merit of the Murray-Darling Medical Schools Network which will go a long way to enabling more rural doctors.
My resolve in the face of pushback in the highest office in the land and subsequent cries of “you’re wrong” from people in high medical places will, I am sure, lead to better outcomes for regional people and it is them — after all — I care about most.
Securing funding for the network was a huge win for regional communities and, from that moment onwards, work was under way to establish the scheme.
Despite all the good it is doing already for rural health, there was a vociferous and relentless outcry against the concept from people who, quite frankly, should have known better.
Co-chairperson of the Australian Medical Students Association (AMSA), Nic Batten, came out swinging in a 24 April 2018 opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald headed “Nationals prescription for rural health care is wrong”.
“Despite the medical education provided by rural clinical schools, and the enthusiasm of the students they train, the opportunities for medical graduates to continue their vocational training in the country and become rural doctors are limited,” Ms Batten wrote.
This came just a month after she had penned an online article in The Medical Republic, entitled: “Just what we don’t need! Another medical school”.
When Central Queensland University announced plans to open a medical school, taking in Bundaberg and Rockhampton, the AMSA slammed the idea as “selfish and wasteful”.
AMSA’s Rural Health Committee went as far as to challenge the Federal and Queensland governments to block all of the new medical school proposals on the table at the time.
Here you had student doctors arguing forcefully against giving other students of the future the rare opportunity to also become doctors!
This was the sort of opposition mounted against a network of medical schools in southern and western NSW and regional Victoria.
AMSA was not alone.
On 3 March 2018, one of the most powerful lobby groups in the nation – the AMA – held its Workforce and Training Summit in Melbourne … a gathering of some of the most influential and controlling health figures in the nation.
“The take home message from the day was that Australia does not need any more medical school places,” the then AMA President Dr Michael Gannon said after the summit.
“There was a clear recognition that the focus needs to shift away from pumping more students into medical schools towards giving medical students more opportunities to train in rural areas, as well as delivering postgraduate training places in the areas and specialties where they are needed.
“We need smarter policies than we have seen from governments in the past. All too often, the opening of a new medical school, or importing more doctors from overseas, is seen as the solution to our medical workforce needs.
“This mindset is driven by short-term political needs, rather than the long-term health needs of our communities.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Dr Gannon on his sentiments regarding international doctors meeting regional health workforce needs.
Too often, I believe, doctors arrive in regional and remote Australia from countries which, to be honest, need them more than we do. On that score alone, it’s lazy policy, if not immoral.
For the record, Dr Gannon is a good medico and no doubt a very good man. As a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, he has had 18 years of experience as a specialist and delivered more than 5,000 babies. He has earned much respect and he has mine for what he has done for his profession and for the many families he has supported.
That said, I believe he is incorrect in his assessment about the worth of medical schools. His view is long held by those running the AMA. And it is palpably wrong.
I much prefer the lived experience of 24-year-old Madeline Ingram, who is in her second year studying Medicine at the UNSW Biomedical Sciences Centre (Medical School), having been educated at Mater Dei Catholic College.
“I cannot understate how important it is to be able to complete all of my degree, from first year to sixth year, here in Wagga Wagga,” Madeline said earlier this year.
“It makes pursuing medicine so much more accessible. I don’t have to move to a capital city, pay exorbitant rent and have to juggle working and studying full-time to stay afloat. In contrast, thanks to this medical school, I can continue to live with my family and can focus more of my energy on studying.”
Then there is Grace Smith, 23, of Sydney who travelled to Wagga in January for a UNSW placement for a few weeks, fell in love with the place and who will complete her course here with every intention of staying.
They are just two of dozens upon dozens of similar stories playing out across the entire medical schools network.
And it is not just those studying to be doctors but also health professionals such as UNSW Associate Dean Rural Health and Head, Rural Clinical Campuses, Professor Tara Mackenzie who came to town 16 years ago and liked it here so much she opted not to return to Sydney.
The much-loved, widely respected and multi-award-winning consultant respiratory physician has contributed mightily to the development of the UNSW medical school and her input, as well as the thousands of volunteer hours put in by Nick Stephenson, Gerard Carroll and other leading medical professionals, has ensured the best start possible by the Wagga medical school.
On average, 75 per cent of UNSW graduates from Wagga do at least their first two years in a rural setting (about 66 per cent in Wagga).
The superb, world-class UNSW building now stands proudly beside our hospital as one of the jewels in the Murray-Darling Medical Schools Network crown.
But buildings are one thing … people matter more.
What will be created in those medical schools network buildings are doctors for regional Australia … bright, energetic, young doctors who will train locally and, in every likelihood, stay locally.
And if having to stand up for what’s right when the leading medicos in the land are telling you you’re wrong is the price to pay, then it is more than worth the effort.
It should not be the case that when in pain catch a plane or to have to wait an extended time to see a GP.
Now, the future is brighter and the proof is with the Madeline Ingrams and Grace Smiths of the world and all the other exceptional young would-be doctors just waiting to get their degree, don a stethoscope and serve country people.
– Opinion piece first featured in The Daily Advertiser, 20 November 2025