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Hear from our team on what it's like to have a career up here in the Torres and Cape.
Duration: 05:03

Work with us

Find out about our salary, super and leave arrangements, healthy workplace benefits and more. Read our applicant information pack [PDF 7824.19 KB].

  • What it's like to work with us

    The Torres Strait Islands and Cape York are hidden wonders. Enjoy being in this remote tropical paradise with amazing wildlife and extraordinary landscapes.

  • Workplace benefits

    We offer attractive pay and conditions, supportive and inclusive workplaces and opportunities to develop your skills and career.

  • Before you start work

    We have information to help you settle into your new role, and your move to the region if you’re new to our area.

Allied health credentialing

As an allied health professional, we determine your competence, performance and professional suitability to practise safely in our hospitals and health services. Learn more about our allied health credentialing.

Nursing and midwifery graduates

We offer rewarding and diverse opportunities to nursing and midwifery graduates including the unique opportunity for first year practitioners to work in remote indigenous communities.

Find out more about our nursing and midwifery graduate program.

Student placements

We offer exciting clinical practice experiences to nursing and midwifery, allied health and medical students from all over Australia.

Learn about our clinical student placements.

Our team

Hear from Dane and Gilly, mental health workers from Weipa.
Duration: 03:53

Transcript

Gilly: Hi, my name is Gilbert Daniel, originally from Thursday Island but I've lived in Weipa for the last ten years.

Dane: I'm Dane Purcel, I'm the senior mental health worker here. My role is primarily with the child and youth mental health service. But as the senior in the Mental Health and AODS Service, I help to support Gilly and our other health worker role as well. And we cover the three communities between the three of us and the three services, adult mental health, child and youth mental health and alcohol and other drugs.

Dane: I think health in any community is very important, it doesn't matter where you are or what culture you belong to. I think obviously, you know, we need to care for not only ourselves but for each other and living here and in Weipa and being so remote the health services here and the access we have to health services now are relatively recent.

Dane: Child and youth mental health services used to fly in, fly out. But now they're based here. The adult mental health service had clinicians that used to fly in, fly out through the week, but now they all live here. So, it's just those very small changes make a big difference to communities.

Dane: But it also allows your clients, like being a small town, to see you on weekends and see you be human. Primarily, we’re advocating for our clients, you know, and we’re acting as that liaison between service and consumer. I think, you know, that feeling we get from helping people, you know, that's probably the most rewarding part of our job. Seeing how we use the service to help them make small adjustments just to better their lives, you know, seeing them further down the track and seeing them happy and not struggling like they did when they first come to us. It's very rewarding for us, very personally rewarding.

Dane: Gilly and I, we have a unique bond where we both started our health work together. You know, back in 2005 and we fell out of touch a little bit because we were living at different ends of the state at the time.

Gilly: But still kept in contact.

Dane: Still kept in contact occasionally and now we are working together in the same team and a lot of other health workers, you know, because we train together, we have that connection to each other and we all have similar roles. It doesn’t matter if you work in mental health or family health or any of the other roles health workers play in our health service. We have that connection through our job, and through our training, and we like to keep connected and support each other as much as possible, any new recruits that come on board, of course we look after them because we can't stay health workers forever, we get old one day and we'd love to help train the next generation as well.

Dane: But yeah, love Weipa, love working with Gilly here. Yes, we have good fun. Keep this going for a while.

Gilly: Yeah, that's it. We’ve still got a couple of years yet.

[End of transcript]

Hear from Hannah, a midwife at Thursday Island Hospital.
Duration: 04:26

Transcript

[Clinical Midwife Hannah standing on a beach.]

My name's Hannah. I'm a clinical midwife and I've been working at Thursday Island maternity unit for four and a half years. I've worked primarily in Aboriginal communities or for Aboriginal control health organisations.

I've spent quite a lot of time travelling throughout Australia and I moved up here in 2018. Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal people are incredibly rich and diverse in culture.

They are one of the oldest cultural groups globally. Who still have huge connections to water and their land and we are incredibly lucky to be able to work with them up here.

So, Torres Strait Islander peoples are probably the people that you want to work with as a midwife.

They teach us more than what we teach them. They're the women who have birthed babies on country for thousands of years without intervention from Westernised medicine.

And they are incredibly humble women and their families and their stories are just so rich and diverse.

First Nations people are fundamentally people who need people to support them and their spiritual and cultural context that is related to health.

I think it's incredibly important for me to understand their story, where they come from, and help bring back some of their health care to country, giving them ownership and allowing them to be self-determining in their health care and their health outcomes.

As a remote midwife your scope of practice as a clinical midwife definitely increases. Within tertiary facilities and metropolitan hospitals, we don't have the ability to work across the full scope and continuum, in remote settings we work with extreme pre-term, as well as post-states, as well as complex medical needs for women.

And that's not something that all midwives get to do. It's something that you get to do in a rural setting.

It's a very different pace of work, so it's not the same as a twenty four bed birth suite in a tertiary facility where everything's happening all the time. It's a place where you actually learn to sit down and build relationships with women because you have the time available to you that you don't have in the other settings.

You're also talking to families about their travel and how they're getting to and from islands or down south to specialist appointments.

And you're also making contact with these women quite early in their pregnancy.

So, MGP models of care are slightly different because geographically thay’ve got to travel over water to get to islands for appointments, whereas mainland more women are coming into the hospitals.

We're kind of more embedded in the community. I have been incredibly blessed to work with Aunty Margie and Aunty Flo.  Throughout my time here they are the people who have taught all midwives everything that needs to be known about caring for these women.

Aunty Maggie has birthed babies of babies of babies here, and she knows the language, she knows the culture, she understands some of the social determinants, especially within particular family groups or islands groups.

Aunty Flo is also an exceptional advocate for women and their babies. They can talk clinicians through island adoption and they keep us culturally appropriate in our care, which people don't know how to do until you've worked with First Nations people and you understand just the importance of not making eye contact at certain times, also making sure that we're delivering health care appropriately and timely, non-judgemental spaces, connecting with their culture and their spirituality, and ensuring that we're also recognising their responsibilities to their community.

Being with these women, you learn more and more about actually stepping back and letting them charge in telling us what we can do to make their health outcomes better.

[End of transcript]