South West Queensland Connection

​Health Workforce Queensland is excited to announce we have successfully recruited Julie Mayer to the South West Queensland Health Workforce Connector (SWQ HWC) position! With over thirty-five years of experience in strategic leadership and management across a diverse range of industry sectors, Julie’s skills in business development and workforce planning have also contributed to the health sector from her beginnings as a nurse to holding high level management positions within aged care, Queensland Hospital and Health Services and WQPHN.

Designed to increase health workforce capacity the HWC role takes a long-term strategic approach that is both contextual and explicitly tailored to the local health environment and its communities. One of the defining characteristics of the HWC role is that recruitment is place-based. This allows the Connector to utilise their experience and knowledge of living and working locally to strengthen engagement with health students, health care settings, industry, community and local government.

As a St George resident, Julie will work across Roma, St George and Charleville, as well as surrounding communities to increase health workforce capacity. Primarily this will be achieved by building structured pathways for multidisciplinary cohorts of GROW Rural SWQ health students to be integrated into local communities and health care settings from first year through to employment as early career graduates. Additionally, Julie will be working with local high schools to foster a grow your own approach to health occupations, as well as integrating new-to-area students and health professionals into community.

Although Julie will work remotely, she’ll join our North Queensland Health Workforce Connector and Gladstone Health Workforce Connector as the way of the future to grow Queensland’s health workforce.

Encouragingly, the potential of the Health Workforce Connector role to increase health workforce capacity has seen interest from federal and state governments, PHNs, as well as business organisations. Health Workforce Queensland has presented on the successes and challenges of the role to the Rural Workforce Agency Network and the Western Downs Health Sustainability Futures Group and shared knowledge regarding the development of a Chinchilla HWC role with Toowoomba Surat Basin Enterprise (TSBE). More developments to come!