It was a day to celebrate for 11 students who graduated the Rural Midwifery Program at Moree Hosptial on Friday.
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The Rural Midwifery Program is a 12-month joint training program with Hunter New England Local Health District (HNELHD) and Charles Sturt University which has been running since 1993.
"Each student has a base hospital they are employed to and then they have a six week rotation," clinical midwife consultant (CMC) and organiser Siubhan McCaffery said.
Each rotation provides the students with an opportunity to gain experience in a different sized unit to the one they are based in.
"Some of our units are a higher level - level four - so they have more services and then places like Moree and Inverell are level three," Ms McCaffrey said.
"So it gives them a chance of the level four people having some opportunity and experience in the smaller unit and the level three people having opportunity in the larger unit where there's a little bit more complexity to the pregnancies and complexity to the births and things like that."
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Each unit has a clinical midwife educator that supports each unit but ms McCaffrey said the students are well supported by the rest of the staff.
"The students also have 10 women that they follow right through their pregnancy, labour and postnatally so there's that continuity of care which is very much the model of care that's a gold standard for women as far as outcomes go," she said.
Dominique Spark was one of the students who graduated after a "tough 12 months."
"I'm glad it's over but I've learnt a lot," she said.
Ms Spark said she will remain in Armidale where she was based for her training.
"I've always dreamed of becoming a midwife," she said.
"I did my RN's (registered nursing course), spent a bit of time working and then one of my good friends did the program last year and convinced me to do it.
"It's really good, I learnt a lot. It's challenging at times because you're learning so much and studying full time at the same time with assignments and stuff, but it's amazing.
"When you bring a baby into this world, it's a pretty cool feeling."
Ms McCaffrey said it's been exciting to see the program grow over the years and it provides a fantastic opportunity to hopefully attract more people to rural areas.
"The exciting thing about it is it's not just creating the clinical midwives of the future in our program, we also create the educators," she said.
"A lot of our educators have done the program. I've done the program. I've been a manager, I'm the CMC, it doesn't just create the clinicians who are so valuable but it also creates the leaders as well."