Bendigo Health: The Regional Hospital Serving Central Victoria

Bendigo Health, the public health service that serves Bendigo and the broader central Victoria and north-central region from the Bendigo Hospital campus and its network of affiliated health services, is one of the largest regional health services in Victoria, providing the acute, sub-acute, mental health, and community health services for a catchment population of approximately 250,000 people. The health service's scale reflects the geographic role that Bendigo plays as the regional capital of central Victoria and the referral destination for the smaller communities of the Loddon Mallee and the northern Victoria region that the Melbourne metropolitan hospitals are too distant to serve practicably.

The new Bendigo Hospital, opened in 2017 as the result of a decade-long capital project funded by the state government, provided the health service with the modern infrastructure that had been needed to replace the aging hospital buildings that the health service had operated across multiple ageing sites. The new facility's consolidation of the acute services on a single campus, with the emergency department, the surgical suites, the intensive care, and the specialist clinical departments in a building designed with the flexibility to accommodate the service growth that the region's expanding population generates, represented the largest infrastructure investment in Bendigo's history.

The mental health services delivered by Bendigo Health, including the acute inpatient unit and the community mental health team that provides ongoing support to people with severe and persistent mental illness in the community, serve a region whose mental health burden reflects the agricultural economic pressures, the service accessibility challenges, and the help-seeking barriers that rural and regional mental health practice encounters more intensely than the metropolitan services. The mental health workforce attraction and retention challenge in regional Victoria is a standing priority for services like Bendigo Health that compete with metropolitan services and private sector employers for the specialist workforce that clinical mental health services require.

The health service's role as a training facility for the La Trobe University medical, nursing, and allied health programs, and for the clinical placements from Melbourne-based universities, makes it a significant contributor to the regional health workforce pipeline. The training relationship between the health service and the universities creates the pathway through which students experiencing regional clinical placements develop the understanding of regional health practice that makes them more likely to choose rural and regional careers.

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