It’s not quite a digital doctor service but a virtual centre for rural health could be a game-changer, as Anisha Satya explains.

A centre without a centre. That’s what Professor Garry Nixon is calling it.

He’s talking about a potentially game-changing virtual Centre for Rural Health, which doesn’t have a dedicated physical site and was launched at Ashburton Hospital on Wednesday.

The centre, made possible through $645,000 funding mostly from Advance Ashburton and the Mackenzie Charitable Foundation, would act as Otago University’s rural health unit. Its main aim would be to support medical teaching and research across rural New Zealand.

It would improve communication and training opportunities by unifying the university’s 46 rural medicine educators scattered throughout the country, while it also merges with the Ashburton Rural Health Academic Centre.

Nixon, a Professor in Rural Health, is the centre’s director. But he’s also a rural doctor at Dunstan Hospital in Clyde and said the centre would also create opportunities to strengthen the rural health workforce by brinGing everyone together under the one umbrella.

That’s needed because rural health was spread out, both geographically in terms of a whole heap of rural communities around the country, but also within the structure of the university.

"This is about bringing those pieces together, so you’ve got one entity whose sole purpose is rural health,” he said.

Nixon said the centre was a first-of-its-kind attempt to centralise efforts for such distanced communities.

"We’re unique by New Zealand standards, and possibly even by Australasian standards, in that we are dispersed. We’re a centre without a centre.”

He said that logistical challenges would present themselves as the centre got started.

But he knows that, for decades, the rural health sector has been facing a declining workforce yet increasing healthcare needs.

That’s why integration like the virtual centre was needed in rural New Zealand to ensure good health outcomes for all communities.

"There’s no simple solution and thinking we can solve a problem with a single intervention is just not going to work.

"The ultimate thing you’re looking for is to improve health outcomes for communities like Ashburton.”

The centre would benefit medical students by making contacts, connections, and all-important data easier to source.

Ashburton Hospital senior doctor Steve Withington said the centre would help academics, both students and staff, share research and training resources virtually, like the patient simulations at the Ashburton Rural Academic Centre.

"We simulate our learning so we can do things the best we possibly can when the real thing happens.”

He admitted the centre helped students working rurally prepare for the worst.

"When patients come through our doors, and they come through not that frequently, but when they do, we’re it,” Withington said.

"We can’t call on someone from another hospital or another place to suddenly whisk them away, because that chopper’s gonna be a while.”

He said the Ashburton academic centre was "one of the nodes” within the virtual centre.

"There are a whole lot of other clinicians working all around the country, but the thing that ties them together is rural health, rural workforce development, rural training, rural resources.”

Rural Health Services' general manager Berni Marra said she was thrilled to see the centre take shape.

"It’s so exciting, we’ve been working on this for a long time.”

She’d started working with the organisation in 2015 and said a lot has changed since she began and the decline of health workers coming back to areas like Mid Canterbury was a key reason for creating the centre.

"We’re constantly training and developing and wanting to encourage people who want to come here and train,’’ she said.

"This is our vision, to build a workforce, who will come back to us and work at our health centre.”

A handful of fifth year medical students on placement from Otago University said at the launch that their rural placements were paying off, with hands-on learning being the biggest plus.

"We get to see a lot of patients by ourselves, which is really cool,” Micah Xing said.

Stephen Potter added that they interacted with more patients than their city-based colleagues.

"When I’m telling my friends, ‘oh, I’m seeing 10-15 patients a day'. They’re lucky if they see one, two, three.

"Here, there’s three (medical) students. In Christchurch, there’s 300, and we’re not competing with each other as much here.”

The students said the centre needed time to get the wheels turning,” so they were not likely to get much from it over their placement.

"I think it’s more for that next batch of students coming through,” Potter said.

But the benefits would soon be obvious across the rural health national network, with Doctor Withington saying virtual meetings would happen regularly.

"Occasionally we’ll come together in person, and support education initiatives, research collaborations, and ongoing workforce development.”

He was just proud that the good old rural can-do attitude helped make such a complex task possible in establishing the virtual centre.

"We know there are a lot of disparities,’’ he said, referencing the various challenges rural health has internationally let alone in New Zealand.

"But there are things, with a number eight wire approach, and with good connectedness, in this virtual space that we can do well.”