Bendigo Health: Regional Healthcare at Scale

Bendigo Health is the major health service for central Victoria, serving a catchment population that extends well beyond the city to include farming communities, smaller regional towns, and the tourism population that passes through the region. The Bendigo Hospital, redeveloped and expanded in a major project completed in 2017, provides the acute care, surgical, and specialist services that the region requires without the need for patients to travel to Melbourne for all but the most specialist interventions.

The new hospital building represented the largest capital investment in regional Victorian healthcare in a generation, delivering modern facilities that addressed the decades of accumulated inadequacy in the previous hospital infrastructure. The redevelopment was notable for its design quality, winning architecture awards and providing a building that functions as a civic asset rather than purely a healthcare facility.

Mental health services at Bendigo Health serve a regional population with significant unmet need. Rural and regional communities have historically had lower access to mental health services than metropolitan areas, and the service pressures that follow from that history remain evident in the demand that Bendigo Health's mental health services face. The expansion of telehealth capability has improved access to specialist mental health consultation for patients in remote parts of the catchment.

Bendigo Health's role as a training facility for medical and nursing students from regional campuses of La Trobe University and other institutions contributes to the pipeline of health professionals who choose to remain in regional Victoria after their training. The presence of training programs creates professional communities and learning cultures in regional health services that improve retention of staff who might otherwise be drawn to metropolitan hospitals for career development reasons.

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