Meleseini Tai-Roche has gone from nurse and midwife to medical student
“I quite like that model where you are a generalist and you do a bit of everything. You can look after families for the long haul as well as maintaining an interest in obstetrics,” she said.
Ms Tai-Roche, 36, who will graduate at the end of the year, has spent the past two years attached to the Notre Dame Wagga Rural Clinical School.
She was on hand when Professor Gabrielle Casper, the head of gynaecology and obstetrics at the Notre Dame School of Medicine Sydney, and the associate dean, Associate Professor Steevie Chan, acknowledged Wagga’s Calvary Riverina Hospital for the teaching that the facility has provided to third year medical obstetrics students since 2015.
Ms Tai-Roche is undertaking a four-year study program open only to graduate-level students.
“Some of my colleagues are physios and pharmacists and teachers and solicitors. Everyone comes from different walks of life and have decided they want to do medicine. Their journey into medicine is really interesting,” she said.
She and husband Brendan Tai-Roach, who is a nurse at Calvary, have two young daughters. Moana is three-and-a-half and Olivia just turned two.
“It is a wonderful environment for us to balance our work and family life, allowing my husband to work part time and help look after the children while I studied to become a doctor.”
The couple met when they were studying and the move to Wagga is just the latest adventure in careers that have taken them as far as the Kimberley.
“We both nursed together, rural and remote, which we both absolutely loved. We love working together and hopefully that will continue in some shape or form,” Ms Tai-Roche said.
Both Ms Tai-Roche and her husband are keen to continue working in regional Australia, and they are not alone.
Ms Tai-Roche’s fellow Notre Dame students say the lifestyle in Wagga has been part of the appeal of studying in the city.
One of them, Harry Jude, said students also had more opportunities here, because they were part of smaller teams than in their major city hospital counterparts.
Depending on their rotation, the students are based at both Calvary and Wagga Base hospitals.
Mr Jude said about 90 per cent of the medical students who studied in Wagga went on to apply for junior medical officer positions in the city.
