“Our cen­tre is prob­a­bly one of the most remote in Vic­to­ria,” said Sarah Carr, Nurs­ing Man­ag­er, who over­sees a team of three oth­er RANs at the Depart­ment of Health fund­ed centre.

“Our nurs­es all live in the Briago­long area, near Strat­ford, near Sale. It takes about an hour to get to work. There’s a house linked to the cen­tre. You can stay up here; it’s almost like a mini-FIFO.

“We’re trained as Remote Area Nurs­es. We respond by pager to any emer­gen­cies that hap­pen in the Dar­go area. We are the first respon­ders. It’s about an hour’s wait for an ambu­lance by road and about 45 min­utes for an emer­gency flight.

“In one shift, you could get an emer­gency call-out for an ambu­lance and be treat­ing pneu­moth­o­rax and decom­press­ing the chest,” Sarah con­tin­ues. ​“You can then come back to the cen­tre and be doing the admin, then in walks wound care. Then you might have a lady want­i­ng a pre­na­tal assess­ment, then a pal­lia­tive care patient, then you’ve got a meet­ing. When you come back there’s a kid with gas­tro or a men­tal health patient.”

The cen­tre has over 230 patients on its books and cov­ers a wide geo­graph­i­cal area. Due to resourc­ing, it has often only had one nurse ros­tered on per shift, mak­ing it a chal­lenge for nurs­es to reach the out­ly­ing community.

“For a home vis­it to, say, Crooked Riv­er, it can take one and a half hours just to get there – mak­ing for a four to five hour round trip,” Sarah said. ​“You can’t close a cen­tre for that long.”

At the same time, farm­ers in out­er Dar­go have demon­strat­ed low lev­els of engage­ment with health care providers. The dis­tance presents an obsta­cle, par­tic­u­lar­ly when con­sid­ered in light of the stress caused by drought, bush­fire and COVID-19.

In ear­ly June, Vic­to­ri­an Min­is­ter for Agri­cul­ture Mary-Anne Thomas announced $350,000 for the ​‘Bush Nurs­ing pilot project’, an ini­tia­tive that aims to equip farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties with the infor­ma­tion, tools and resources to improve health out­comes and build resilience. The funds come out of the state government’s $20-mil­lion Smarter, Safer Farms initiative.

The pilot focus­es on sup­port­ing farm­ers who are geo­graph­i­cal­ly hard­er to reach, with fund­ing going to six Bush Nurs­ing Cen­tres in Gipp­s­land includ­ing the Dar­go Bush Nurs­ing Cen­tre, plus sim­i­lar cen­tres in Ensay, Gelan­tipy, Swifts Creek, Buchan and Cann Valley.

“The great news is that with the fund­ing we have been able to employ a nurse to work one day a week along­side anoth­er nurse. That nurse will pri­mar­i­ly run the project one day a week.”

“For a long time we have done screen­ing and health pro­mo­tion… but we have usu­al­ly had to focus on peo­ple com­ing to the cen­tre to do that.”

“Now, instead of hav­ing to close the cen­tre to do home vis­its, and leave the cen­tre unmanned, we’re going to have anoth­er nurse here to do the home vis­its. It’s a great resource to have!”

In July, Sarah explained that there had been a ​“real­ly pos­i­tive” ini­tial com­mu­ni­ty response.

She went on to say that the Dar­go cen­tre planned to approach 30 to 40 farm­ers who haven’t accessed health­care in the last 12 to 24 months.

Many of the can­di­dates are to be with­in the vul­ner­a­ble 65+ age group and male, because his­tor­i­cal­ly men have engaged less with health­care than women in Dargo.

“We’ll be doing home vis­its on the road, mak­ing a time that’s con­ve­nient for par­tic­i­pants. If it’s hay sea­son or it’s busy on the farm, we’ll work in with what they’re doing.”

“We’ll ini­tial­ly ask how they’re going and what’s been hap­pen­ing. And we will do a lot of health screen­ing dur­ing vis­its. We’ll be

look­ing at stan­dard things like blood pres­sure, weight/​height, and glu­cose lev­els; but also bow­el screen­ing with test­ing-at-home kits and cho­les­terol checks using a point-of-care cho­les­terol check­ing machine we are going to purchase.”

“Basi­cal­ly it will be an all-sys­tems check. And if any­thing is flagged, we’ll be part of the refer­ral process as well. We’ll help organ­ise GP spe­cial­ist appoint­ments, write let­ters, fol­low up with health pro­fes­sion­als and liaise on behalf of the patient.”

“We are hop­ing that if the pilot project is suc­cess­ful, we could look at get­ting addi­tion­al fund­ing through the next few years – which would be absolute­ly amazing.”