Building better health outcomes in rural Victoria
Melbourne Business School partnered with Grampians Health to evolve their culture and leadership capability to improve health outcomes for thousands of regional and rural Victorians.
In 2021, health services across Victoria’s sprawling northwest came together to create Grampians Health.
This amalgamation of Ballarat Health Services, Stawell Regional Health, Wimmera Health Care Group, Edenhope and District Memorial Hospital, and East Grampians Health Service wasn’t just about operational efficiency, it was about tackling deeply entrenched problems in rural healthcare explained Grampians Health CEO, Dale Fraser.
“Rural and regional Victorians don’t enjoy great healthcare,” Dale said.
“Generally speaking, the life expectancy in rural Victoria is slightly less than metropolitan Victoria. Access to healthcare is a big, big issue.”
With such a large-scale amalgamation, a number of cultural and operational hurdles were presented.
That’s where Melbourne Business School came in, helping shape new habits, behaviours, and mindsets across the entire organisation that will drive better health outcomes for rural Victorians.
“It’s through partnerships such as Melbourne Business School that we will see a substantial stepwise change in the capability of our health leaders in Australia,” Dale said.
A New Approach to Culture
Grampians Health recognised that they needed to build a shared organisational culture and develop leaders who could work within, and shape, that culture.
“One of the challenges through that is that we weren’t able to connect,” Claire Wood, Chief People Officer of Grampians Health said.
“And in healthcare, connecting is really important—both with our patients and also with each other.”
Instead of implementing a traditional top-down culture assessment, Grampians Health and Melbourne Business School embarked on a ground-up discovery process.
This was not a diagnostic snapshot, but an immersive ethnographic exploration of culture as it’s lived every day, explained Kiara Gregory, Associate Principal with Melbourne Business School’s Client and Learner Solutions.
“Culture is something that is happening around us all the time,” Kiara said.
“We’ve been able to uncover a lot of nuance in the system... and really importantly, the leadership needs for this particular project.”
Over three weeks, the School's team embedded themselves across Grampian Health's five sites, spanning a footprint of over 48,000 square kilometers and a workforce of 6,500.
“We met a lot of different people, got to know the environment and the operational challenges, and started to make connections between the way culture moved and the way leadership was operating,” Kiara said.
This bottom-up approach revealed not just what the culture was, but what it could be.
More Than a Program: A Partnership
For Grampians Health, the School built deep trust that allowed for honest, challenging conversations about what needed to change.
“Melbourne Business School has been a delight to work with... but also really challenging for us at times,” Dale said.
“They haven’t come in and told us what we wanted to hear. They’ve given us strong feedback about what we can do better.”
The early results speak for themselves. Staff at all levels have reported feeling heard, and there’s been a marked boost in morale and motivation.
“People really appreciated being able to have conversations about what works well and what doesn’t work well at Grampians Health,” he said.
And this is just the beginning.
Melbourne Business School is now working with Grampians Health to deliver an ambitious organisation-wide leadership development program.
These programs won’t just build leaders, they will help shape new habits, behaviours, and mindsets across the entire organisation.
Over the next two years, the initiative will touch hundreds of leaders, building momentum toward a new way of working.
A Blueprint for Regional Health
The partnership offers a replicable model for other health organisations across Australia.
It shows what’s possible when consulting is about more than frameworks and when it’s about trust, immersion, and respect for complexity.
“Our staff have faced bushfires, floods, and major organisational change,” said Dale.
“And they’ve shown remarkable leadership in those circumstances. We owe it to them, and to our communities, to build a culture and system that supports that leadership."
Grampians Health is becoming a national exemplar not just of health system reform, but of what it means to lead with courage and curiosity.
Interested in partnering with Melbourne Business School’s consulting team?
Our work with Grampians Health is just one example of how we help organisations navigate complex transformation through leadership, culture, and strategic insight.
If you’re interested in learning out how we can help your business shape it’s next chapter, visit our For Organisations page.
