Barwon Health: The Regional Health System Anchoring Geelong's Medical Sector

Barwon Health, the public health service that operates University Hospital Geelong and the network of community health centres, rehabilitation facilities, and mental health services that provide the public health care for the Barwon South West region stretching from Geelong to the Great Ocean Road communities and the southwest Victoria hinterland, is one of the largest and most comprehensive regional health services in Australia and the health employer that sustains the significant medical, nursing, and allied health workforce that Geelong's health sector represents as one of the major components of the Geelong employment base. University Hospital Geelong, the 580-bed acute hospital at Ryrie Street in the Geelong CBD, is the busiest and most complex public hospital in regional Victoria and the trauma and tertiary referral centre for the southwest of the state whose regional hospital network uses the Geelong service for the presentations that the smaller hospitals cannot manage.

The Deakin University School of Medicine partnership with Barwon Health, providing the clinical training and the medical research collaboration that the co-location of the medical school and the teaching hospital creates for the medical education and the research programs that sustain the clinical quality and the workforce development that the regional health system requires, gives Geelong the academic health centre model that the major metropolitan health systems use but that the regional cities have historically lacked. The medical students training in the Barwon Health system alongside the Deakin academics and the clinical researchers create the intellectual environment of the teaching hospital that attracts the quality clinical staff that the research culture and the teaching roles that a teaching hospital provides create as the career incentives for the specialist clinicians who might otherwise be drawn to the metropolitan academic hospitals.

The mental health services of Barwon Health, including the acute inpatient unit and the community mental health teams that provide the outreach and the recovery support for the people with serious mental illness in the Geelong and the broader Barwon South West region, address the mental health burden that a large regional city with the socioeconomic diversity and the social stressors that the post-industrial economic transition and the geographic isolation from the metropolitan mental health specialist resources create. The community mental health model, delivering the care to the people with mental illness in the community settings that allow the maintenance of the social connections and the daily routines that recovery supports, rather than in the acute hospital setting that disrupts the community integration, reflects the contemporary mental health treatment philosophy that Barwon Health's mental health services have implemented.

The cardiology and the oncology services at University Hospital Geelong, the specialist services that the regional population requires without the Melbourne travel that the absence of the local specialist service would impose, provide the clinical care at the quality that the subspecialty volumes that the large regional catchment sustains create for the clinical outcomes that concentrate the experience and the skill that the lower volume services of the smaller regional hospitals cannot accumulate. The cancer care services, including the radiation oncology treatment that the linear accelerators at University Hospital Geelong deliver, reduce the treatment burden for the cancer patient in the southwest of Victoria who would otherwise commute to Melbourne for each radiation treatment session in the lengthy course of radiation therapy that the curative and the palliative treatment protocols require.

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