The report identified 16 priority locations experiencing ‘significant workforce pressures’, including Ararat, Stawell, Nhill and St Arnaud.
It showed the most pressing shortages in the Western Victoria region were in the fields of allied health, mental health, nursing and specialist services.
Nick Bush, the chief executive of Ararat-based East Grampians Health Service, EGHS, said the service had a ‘grow-your-own’ strategy of training nurses locally, but that it needed to recruit from further afield in other areas.
He said finding appropriate housing was one of the biggest challenges for EGHS when it came to recruiting staff from outside the region.
“We lease around 29 houses in the local community to house our professional staff,” he said.
“We’re aiming to build purpose-built accommodation for staff.
“Ultimately we’d like them to own and live in our community or rent long-term in our community, but we are aware of the reality that some people will be building their skills and careers to move elsewhere.”
Mr Bush said EGHS had purchased two properties that were earmarked for future housing builds and had plans to acquire another.
He said the service would require government funding to build the accommodation, but that the project would ease pressure on the local rental market once complete.
“It’s a longer-term view. We can then release those 29 houses back into the local community and help other businesses and other community members,” he said.
“We would stage it as we got grants and funds. So in the first stage we’d like to build six self-contained units, then build on and get to 12, and then get to 18.
“By the time we’ve got to 18, we think our workforce strategies will be at a level that we’ll have more people who are professionals in our area and we won’t have such a reliance on accommodation like we do today, because our work with the universities is really starting to pay off.
“With the Deakin Medical School in our area there’s 15 people studying, and half of those are from the Wimmera.
“We’re hoping those doctors will land in our rural communities and we won’t need to provide them with housing because they will be local residents.”
RWAV last month announced a project, in partnership with Monash University, to map housing shortages affecting Victoria’s rural health workforce.
RWAV chief executive Lauren Cordwell said housing was ‘becoming an increasingly important factor in whether health professionals choose to live and work in rural communities’.
“Health services regularly tell us that accommodation challenges can make it difficult to recruit and retain the workforce they need,” she said.
“This partnership with Monash University School of Rural Health will provide critical evidence about the nature and scale of the supply and demand of housing across rural Victoria.”
Rural Northwest Health, RNH, interim chief executive Lois O’Callaghan echoed the sentiment that housing was a barrier to recruiting rural health workers.
The service last year completed four new houses for workers at its Hopetoun campus using money from the State Government’s Regional Worker Accommodation Fund.
“At Rural Northwest Health we’ve been on a big recruitment drive over a number of years now, trying to stabilise our workforce,” Ms O’Callaghan said.
“Probably the biggest barrier has always been the capital infrastructure that you need – so where you house people.
“We rent and own about 35 properties around the region that we work in. We rent about 18 of those and own the rest. So we’re basically a real-estate agent in the scheme of things.”
Ms O’Callaghan said competing interests in the region placed even greater pressure on housing.
“There’s a mineral sands mine down near Donald and Minyip where they’re going to be housing staff not just in that area, but going out a bit more broadly looking for housing,” she said.
“WestWind has got a big wind development happening around this part of the region that will employ a lot of staff during the build.
“Then we also have a local hay-processing facility where there will be about 30 staff that they’re on the hunt for in terms of housing.
“So despite our best efforts to try and be a preferred tenant for rental properties, we’re in a pretty tight market. Then it becomes an expensive market as well, because we’re competing against corporate tenants.”
With RNH receiving no subsidies to help pay for worker rental accommodation, Ms O’Callaghan said housing put a dent in the health service’s annual budget.
“If we’re renting 18 properties at, say, $400 a week, multiply that by 52 and you’d get nearly $375,000 a year,” she said.
“It would be helpful if we had ongoing investment around this issue, because it becomes tighter and tighter and tighter.
“As an example, we’ve got five families who we’ve sponsored to come and work here at Rural Northwest Health. We’re not actually sure where we’re going to house them just yet, but they will arrive soon.
“We’re under pressure all the time to make sure we’ve physically got somewhere we can house people so they can come and work here, so we can then have the flow-on effect of service delivery within the community.”
Both Ms O’Callaghan and Mr Bush said they were monitoring the Federal Government’s efforts to lower Australia’s migration intake.
Ms O’Callaghan said she was yet to observe negative effects from changes Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke had already made, but she viewed migration as a positive for Australia in general and regional communities in particular.
“In terms of our international recruitment, we’ve had pretty good success on that front, so we wouldn’t want that pipeline to stop,” she said.
“It’s made our workforce very diverse, and that’s had a fabulous flow-on effect in terms of not just what we learn from other people that we work with who are from diverse backgrounds, but then it stabilises your local economy too.
“I don’t think the value of that can be oversold. Anyone who thinks rural communities are a bit closed-minded about that stuff, I would challenge that and say, ‘no, that’s actually not the case’.”
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