How significant is rural background to recruiting and retaining rural and remote area nurses?
How significant is rural background to recruiting and retaining rural and remote area nurses? Conference Paper
9th National Rural Health Conference: Standing up for Rural Health - Learning from the past - Action for the future
- Author(s): Kerry Taylor, Julie Henderson, Jane Neill
- Published: 2007
Abstract: Attracting and retaining nurses to rural and remote Australia remains an ongoing challenge. Flinders University offers undergraduate nursing students the opportunity to experience rural and remote clinical placements with the dual aims of influencing career choices and/or enhancing the understanding of the care needs of rural and remote populations who may require medical treatment in metropolitan settings. This paper describes preliminary findings of a career progression survey that examined the factors registered nurses saw as significant to their chosen career paths since graduation. Specifically it asked participants in the Flinders University School of Nursing & Midwifery’s (SON&M) undergraduate program about their clinical experiences in remote and rural areas of Central Australia and South Australia over an eight year period from 1998 to 2005. Much of the literature to date reinforces a widely held belief that rural background is a major contributing factor to health professionals’ propensity to seek and remain employed in rural areas. This has not been conclusively demonstrated in the case of remote health practice which is rarely examined independently to rural issues. So strong is the belief in the significance of rural backgrounds that scholarships, bursaries and other incentives are offered almost exclusively to this population in an effort to address the characteristic staff shortages of rural and remote health services. In the process, a larger pool of potential recruits originating from urban areas have been overlooked for support in the largely untested assumption that they will be less likely to return to rural or remote practice. This paper follows earlier publications on the implications of providing undergraduate clinical experiences in rural and remote areas. It presents preliminary findings of current research suggesting that rural background is only one factor influencing career choices for nurses. The authors advocate for an expansion of current supports and incentives to be made available to urban-backgrounded persons as well as those of rural background, as undergraduate clinical experience is showing to be highly influential to the uptake of rural and remote practice. Furthermore, qualitative data obtained in this research suggests that encouraging urban-backgrounded students to experience rural and remote practice can have broader benefits than for health workforces alone. Potentially transferable skills, knowledge and awareness of rural and remote issues among urban based health professionals can enhance the care and co-ordination of services and improve patient outcomes in a variety of practice settings.
- Urls: http://www.ruralhealth.org.au/9thNRHC/9thnrhc.ruralhealth.org.au/program/docs/papers/taylor_B4.pdf
- Publisher Location: Albury, NSW