Bass Coast Health is pleased to welcome the largest graduate nurse intake that we have ever had.
Sixteen graduate nurses – some who are local to Bass Coast and others who have relocated from within Victoria and interstate – started at BCH in February.
Graduate nurses will undertake either two six-month rotations, or three, four-month rotations depending on their discipline. Rotations are undertaken in a number of clinical settings including District Nursing, Emergency, Sub-Acute, Acute, Theatre and Aged Care, said BCH Graduate Coordinator Joanne O’Connor.
"I’m very excited and am looking forward to the year ahead. We are blessed to have such an excellent calibre of graduates and we are so pleased to be able to provide excellent support around them,” she said.
“Bass Coast Health is very focused on providing a positive training experience to our graduates with the hope they will continue to work with us, particularly given our growth with the Wonthaggi Hospital Expansion project.”
Not only do we provide a graduate program for Registered Nurses but we also support Endorsed Enrolled Nursing Graduates. Megan Glacken is undertaking the Endorsed Enrolled Nurse program and relocated from Cairns in far north Queensland to join the BCH team.
“I wanted a location change and I found during the interview with Bass Coast Health that it was a supportive environment and its values of WE CARE align with my own values,” she said.
“I’m looking forward to experiencing all the rotations. At the moment I’m in Theatre and then I will go to Sub-acute and then Aged Care.
"So far I have found the community to be really welcoming. Just walking up the street, everyone wants to say ‘hello’ to you.”
Kristian Kumarich is also participating in the Endorsed Enrolled Nurse program, having relocated to the area from Dandenong.
“I came to Bass Coast Health because I was interested to see how a health service runs in a rural area because during my studies I was in metropolitan health services that have extra resources and support each other,” he said.
As part of the graduates’ early training, our new team members took part in a simulated CPR exercise with Bass Coast Health Emergency Physician Dr Jonathan Henry.
“It’s important to maintain fluency in rare critical incident scenarios so as we are ready when such situations occur,” he said.
The Learning and Development team at BCH has recently expanded significantly in order to provide more extensive support and learning across the organisation, not only in clinical areas but also for non-clinical staff.
This growth has also been supplemented with the expansion of our relationships with our partners in universities and training centres. For our nurses specifically, we can employ a local student nurse into our service as a RUSON (Registered Undergraduate Student of Nursing).
They can then undertake their graduate year at BCH and then go on to a transition year and specialisation in a specific area via our transition to speciality program and post graduate speciality programs. This gives nurses the ability to undertake a career pathway at BCH.
Coming soon we are hoping to have something similar for local allied health students and to then expand this into our corporate areas.
“We are working on these pathways for all our staff in all areas, so that everyone has the chance to develop and grow! It is a very exciting time for the Learning and Development team,” Learning and Development Manager Trina Coxon said.