Can I hon­est­ly say that when I first jour­neyed into remote area nurs­ing, I knew what MMM was? Where I was going and whether it was clas­si­fied as rur­al or remote? To be hon­est, the answer was no.

I had a nurs­ing back­ground in a met­ro­pol­i­tan emer­gency depart­ment. That was my day-to-day work, in a busy ED, clients com­ing and going and col­leagues every­where! Lit­tle did I know that my jour­ney was going to change ever so slightly.

I applied with a nurs­ing agency to get some expe­ri­ence work­ing with­in the NT. I had no ideas of where or what was required.

The agency informed me that with my back­ground, I should be start­ing in a rur­al hos­pi­tal, which might be a more sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment to begin my tran­si­tion to remote. I was hap­py and thought that this sound­ed like a great idea.

It was only a few days lat­er that the agency called back and I sud­den­ly found myself with a plan to fly out to a remote Abo­rig­i­nal com­mu­ni­ty approx­i­mate­ly 400km away from the clos­est region­al hos­pi­tal! It was accessed by dirt roads and cut off in the wet season.

Com­ing from a city hos­pi­tal, I was sur­prised to see that the emer­gency room was fit­ted with a ward bed, some out­dat­ed equip­ment, and a doc­tor that only attend­ed to emer­gen­cies if they occurred dur­ing the day. There was no press­ing the blue but­ton and hav­ing every­one come run­ning to help!

So, where does the MMM fit in with all this, and what is it exact­ly? The MMM (Mod­i­fied Monash Mod­el) defines whether a loca­tion is clas­si­fied as a city, rur­al, remote or very remote. 

It mea­sures the remote­ness and pop­u­la­tion size of that area to deter­mine a num­ber between MM1-MM7, with MM1 being a major city and MM7 being very remote. To give some exam­ples, Bourke is a 7, Alice Springs is a 6, Oberon is a 5, Ather­ton is a 4, Albany is a 3, Dar­win is a 2, and Syd­ney is a 1.

The Depart­ment of Health uses the MMM to deter­mine work­force dis­tri­b­u­tion, so this might help under­stand where and why health pro­fes­sion­als are locat­ed where they are, and why some loca­tions might have more ser­vices than others. 

The MMM is used in con­junc­tion with oth­er data by the Depart­ment of Health in work­force clas­si­fi­ca­tions to deter­mine the population’s access to health care. It is used also to deter­mine areas clas­si­fied as geo­graph­i­cal remote­ness and town size together.

If this isn’t con­fus­ing yet, you may have heard of oth­er words such as ASGS-RA (Aus­tralian Sta­tis­ti­cal Geog­ra­phy Stan­dards – Remote­ness Areas) and the pre­vi­ous Monash Mod­el. These were very use­ful in pre­vi­ous years but as time has elapsed and the indus­try has evolved, mod­els have been reviewed and stake­hold­er con­sul­ta­tions have deter­mined the MMM, which is what we have now.

The MMM now includes more descrip­tion, includ­ing the Aus­tralian Sta­tis­ti­cal Geo­graph­i­cal Stan­dards regard­ing remote­ness area (2016).

So, if you are asked about your rur­al or remote loca­tion, or want to be pre­pared by know­ing how remote you are going (unlike I was!), or you’re apply­ing for a grant or schol­ar­ship with a spe­cif­ic rur­al or remote eli­gi­bil­i­ty, now you know about the MMM.

In hind­sight, if I knew what the MMM was and looked it up, I would have realised I was going from MM1 to MM7. Which was a very unplanned tran­si­tion to remote!