"What we're moving towards is developing programs that will cover students all the way from their course based programs with the university right through to the hospital program," he says.

Southern Health has also embraced location-based technology recently deploying a real-time location system (RTLS) in both its emergency and mental health departments which lets staff track assets, people and resources, pinpointing where they are, how long they've been there and where and when they went.

"Knowledge is power and being able to follow that sort of information gives us the ability to be more efficient," Ferguson says of the system. "The more efficient you are the greater your patient throughput and you can treat patients quicker.

"It's a very exciting system for us -- one that I think a lot of hospitals have fantasised about -- but to actually deploy a robust enterprise solution is a great leap forward for us."