They will have spent the previous three years in Shepparton, which will hopefully mean many will choose to work in the Goulburn Valley.
They will have graduated with a medical degree and won’t have needed to live in a capital city for any part of their studies.
These 2026 doctors started last year, studying a dual degree pathway developed by La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne.
The students will enrol in an undergraduate Bachelor of Biomedicine at La Trobe, offered at either the Bendigo or Wodonga.
After that they move to the University of Melbourne’s School of Rural Health in Shepparton, where they study the postgraduate Doctor of Medicine, which will take a further three years.
This initiative, which is a great credit to La Trobe and Melbourne, is one of a number of attempts to solve the rural and regional doctor shortage. Students who study regionally are more likely to live regionally.
Also, it removes a major roadblock to study medicine for kids from the country. Living in Melbourne is expensive, and not to everyone’s taste.
Hopefully the northern Victorian option of Bendigo or Wodonga then Shepparton nets us a pipeline of caring, competent country doctors who know the regions and the people and are inclined to make a career in the bush.
More degrees should be offered in regional centres.
We need the professionals, and students from secondary schools outside Melbourne are unfairly discriminated against as they have to relocate for university, whereas their city counterparts can avail themselves of the parental home.
Some have the desire and means to have the metro experience but for those that don’t, the courses that are offered regionally are the only option.
There are good offerings regionally, including engineering in Bendigo and accountancy in Shepparton.
A degree I completed, the University of Melbourne’s Bachelor of Applied Science at the Dookie campus, doesn’t exist anymore.
It was an excellent course – academic and well-rounded, but practical.
Students now wishing to study agriculture at the University of Melbourne do it at Parkville, with the option of some time at Dookie.
Thanks to the faculty’s recent re-commitment to Dookie, and some local advocacy, the options for studying at the beautiful sprawling campus only 20 minutes out of Shepparton are improving.
Hopefully we can see agriculture and other degrees offered end to end in the future.