Six great reasons to join us at Taumarunui

1. Friendly, supportive team.
   
   
2. Professional variety at work.
   
   
3. Links to a major tertiary hospital for learning and development opportunities.
   
   
4. Rural lifestyle, with top ski fields just down the road.
   
   
5. Work/Life balance – for real!
   
   
6. Great value for money in housing and rentals.
   
   

Situated in the heart of the North Island, in a sheltered scenic valley, Taumarunui township has a population of about 5000 residents.

It’s within easy driving distance of Hamilton city, Taupo and Taranaki, and is on the daily rail service between Auckland and Wellington.

Working and living in Taumarunui gives you variety, balance and puts you on the doorstep to a wonderful outdoor recreation playground.

Taumarunui Hospital is part of a cluster of hospital and health services delivered by Waikato District Health Board's provider arm Health Waikato. There are also a number of private and contracted health services in the town, including aged care facilities, a general practice and community trusts.

Working in a rural hospital does not mean you are isolated. There are strong professional and educational links to Waikato Hospital, a 600-bed secondary/tertiary and teaching hospital about two and a half hours drive north in Hamilton city.

If you are into

• work/life balance
• affordable living costs
• happy working environment
• professional satisfaction
• and an outdoor recreation lifestyle
  

You'll love working in Taumarunui. Check in our Vacancies web page for any current Waikato DHB jobs based at Taumarunui.

Current vacancies

 

Here’s an overview of the health facilities and roles you can find in Taumarunui.

Hospital services	Allied health and community based services	Private and contracted health services
Taumarunui Hospital is a 10-bed facility that includes: inpatients facilities assessment primary maternity emergency department high dependency unit laboratory radiology outpatients department theatre for some procedures	Based on the hospital campus are a number of allied health and community-based services including: occupational therapy physiotherapy public health nurses district nurses health promoters diabetes educator ear nurse social worker plus  drug and alcohol counsellor; and mental health services.	St John Ambulance Avonlea Hospital & Home Taumarunui Community Kokiri Trust and The Family Clinic Medical Centre

Let us tell you why we love working here

I’m Don Hall, support services manager at Taumarunui Hospital. I’ve worked here for about 17 years.

This hospital is a big part of the community, and the community really appreciates us.

What makes it special working here? Well, we try to keep a team approach to things, we help each other out. This is something that happens in a smaller hospital. What happens in one department affects another department very much.

You’re not on your own.

If you like the outdoors, you’ve got a whole lot of facilities here. Fishing, hiking, kayaking, golf, bowls, hunting, tramping, BMX and mountain bikes, plenty of walking tracks, and river trips down the Whanganui River – there’s fantastic scenery down there. The Tongariro National Park is only 45 minutes away for walks and skiing.

Get away from that city traffic. In Taumarunui, you don’t have to sit for an hour in commuter traffic. In that time you could be heading to the ski fields or across to Lake Taupo.

You can buy a good three-bedroom home for $160-200,000.  If you want a lifestyle block for your family, you can get a really nice home with six acres or so for $400,000. There is a secondary school and several primary schools right in Taumarunui and other schools nearby.

That’s the beauty of it, it’s all here.

We have very good links with Waikato Hospital - you’re only an email and phone call away, or two and a half hours by car. We recently hosted the Waikato DHB board members for their monthly meeting. It’s part of their schedule to visit all the rural hospitals at least once a year. That was the chief executive’s third visit here.

Photos below: Taumarunui Hospital staff talk with the board members and the chief executive

We live in this quality country environment, but we’re not isolated.

Hi - I'm Annabel - registered nurse at Taumarunui Hospital. We’ve got about 30 nurses based at the hospital. Personally I think the atmosphere is great.

I really like the variation in work and not seeing the same things or dealing with the same issues all the time. Maternity, acute, cardiac, rehab, it gives you quite a bit of diversity. If you want to specialise in one area, this isn’t the place for you.

If you want variety, this is a great place to work.

Two of us from Taumarunui were put forward for a Pebbles programme - it’s one day a month at Waikato Hospital, and it's about encouraging personal and professional growth, sharing new knowledge, and building leadership qualities in younger nurses and midwives from all over Waikato District Health Board. Photos right: At a Pebbles workshop, Waikato Hospital

Taumarunui is my home town. I finished my nursing training at Auckland AUT in 2001, and then I had my first child, so I came back here for family support.

Initially I didn’t want to stay for long, but your focus in life changes when you have kids. I love skiing, my children love skiing. I’ve been to cities all around the world, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else!

I’ve had .4FTE to .8FTE nursing roles – and another child. A lot of other students I trained with put off having children because they didn’t have the flexibility and support I have had at Taumarunui Hospital.

You build great relationships in and out of work. It’s harmonious.

I'm Bronwyn - registered nurse, Taumarunui Hospital. Taumarunui is a great place for family life and bringing up children. I love it! 

The opportunity for children to grow up in a rural community is really great. There are lots of sporting events they can do, and the kids learn to ski on school trips to Mt Ruapehu. The local schools are good - about 95 per cent of the children of hospital staff attend the local primary and secondary schools.

Working in the hospital you get a really ‘in touch’ feeling with the community. The staff are friendly and fun to work with, we are all friends as well as colleagues.

In the smaller community you have a depth of connection with people.

Work is challenging in that you use a very broad range of skills, and you have to deal with a variety of presentations. It’s allowed me to practice a wide range of skills and develop my accountability and advocacy. We have a high dependency department and some theatre work, and there’s an opportunity to work on the mobile surgical bus every five weeks or so.

Do we get professional support? Yes. We have on-call doctors we can talk to at any time, and we can contact Waikato Hospital doctors by phone. We have inservice sessions from visiting doctors, and reps, and Waikato DHB people come down with nursing education sessions too.

We have our own clinical nurse educator at the hospital, and the district nurses based here also have a community clinical nurse educator.

You still have challenges for your nursing skills, but it’s less stressful pressure all the time.

I’ve got family in Tauranga, and friends in Hamilton and Taranaki - Taumarunui is central to travel to all those areas, and it’s no problem travelling either south to Wellington or north to Auckland if you want the big city experience.

I'm Daphne and I'm a clinical nurse manager at Taumarunui Hospital. We are a 19 bed facility, with all the beds housed in one area. We cover ED, maternity, surgical, rehab, paediatrics, oncology. We also do transfers to Waikato Hospital, support local GPs, two local rest homes, outpatient facilities and some minor day stay surgical procedures as well. You get to do lots of everything, you’re a jack of all trades. We take professional development seriously. We are proactive in training our staff. For example, most of our nurses go off to do national triage course so they feel comfortable working in an emergency department. Three of our nurses have done Clinical Training Agency (CTA) papers this year.

We have good close liaison with our allied health services and that’s extremely important and one of our strengths - physiotherapy services, occupational therapy services, adult day care programme, social work services, health promoters, and also mental health services.

We were recently audited and one of the things they picked up was our good communication with each other. But it’s also picked up by others – our visiting outpatient consultant and the physicians that come here once a week.

We are a friendly bunch and embrace a lot of different personalities, and I think we do that very well.

We’ve got a strong team environment.

Useful links

• Ruapehu District Council
• Taumarunui community and business
• Skiing on Mt Ruapehu (Whakapapa and Turoa skifields)
• Golfing at Taumarunui's 'Tarrangower' course
• Taumarunui High School
• Taumarunui Primary School
• Tarrangower Primary School
• Turaki Primary School
• Marunui Primary School
• www.realestate.co.nz (for real estate searches)