Health care training goes offshore

OSBORNE Park-based human resources provider TR7 is hoping to meet the shortfall of health care workers in Western Australia by bringing in fully trained staff from overseas.

As a government-approved company sponsor, TR7 is going one step further than simply providing a migration service; the company will be conducting its own training in Manila, in the Philippines, to ensure the strictly screened staff are trained up to TR7’s existing high standards.

TR7 director Shane Anderson, who co-founded the company with fellow director Nick Gibson, said there was a critical need for healthcare workers in the state because of the drain of talent to the mining and oil and gas sectors.

“Someone has to come up with a solution on the skills shortage here,” Mr Anderson said.

“And our clients see the huge problem of turnover, the problem of skilled staff, so to me it fits perfectly because of the persona of the Filipinos: they are caring and they have a huge number of people going through nursing over there who can’t get jobs – 37,000 graduated in July this year and 80 per cent of those won’t get work.”

TR7 has been providing recruitment services for the mining, oil and gas, engineering and construction sectors since 2003, and in 2006 it became a registered training organisation after the co-founders recognised a shortage in the market. The company is the only RTO that offers a certificate IV in allied health assistance in Perth.

TR7 recently merged with home-care provider Crown Care, which offers social support and in-home respite care and will now operate under the TR7 Health Care banner.

“We had all these other things under our scope and we wanted to get involved in nursing, and that propelled us forward,” Mr Anderson said.

“When I started in the sector, there were certificate III people coming in who didn’t even know how to change a bed. So what I set out to do was change the quality of the sector and the pay rates in health care. These people were getting paid $15, $16 per hour, I’m putting forward rates of up to $25 per hour.”

TR7 counts The Bethanie Group, Silver Chain and Uniting Church Homes among its clients and trains more than 350 students each year.

Mr Anderson told WA Business News that while the company was young by industry comparison, he believed it to be a leader in the sector and was confident the training in Manila would be a success.

“But even if we keep training [local] people up, there still aren’t enough people, we need to wake up and come up with different ways of doing it,” Mr Anderson said.

“The state government is going to be bringing out the official skilled occupation list in the next few weeks, that’s the key to unlock the door that was inhibited before, and [the list] will have aged carer, disability carer, nursing assistant and personal carer on there now and that’s a big tick from me because it’s very relevant to WA.”

Mr Anderson said that, in the federal area, carers had “been wiped off the list”.

“We have 5,000 people going up to Gorgon, Pluto and so on, and you add that on top of a long, sustained growth in mining; what does that mean for the education and health systems?” he asked.

“Fortunately the state government is more attuned to what’s going on in the sector in terms of staffing needs and the particular areas we need help with.”