TAMWORTH is set to play a huge role in boosting regional Australia as a home for medical professionals.
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The Rural Health Workforce has released a report calling for better training pathways for nurses and allied health workers to practice regionally. And Tamworth has the infrastructure to become a key starting point for students looking to kick off a career in the bush.
Tony Smith, deputy director of the University of Newcastle’s department of rural health in Tamworth, co-authored the report which calls on the Australian government to address the maldistribution of the country’s health workforce.
A key finding from the report was marketing the diversity of rural practice.
“There’s a prevailing perspective that somehow rural practice is sort of backwater and people are going to miss out,” Associate Professor Smith said.
The educator said the “deficit model” was not working in attracting health staff to the bush.
“If we tell people they are over-worked, there’s a bigger disease burden and higher mortality rates, that doesn’t sound attractive,” he said.
“But you can practice in a diverse range. And in rural health practice you can feel that the work is valued and you can feel the warmth.”
Professor Smith said it was important to plug the personal benefits of rural life including more affordable real estate.
The report also recommended better models of financial support for nurses and allied health students seeking rural placement and encouraging metropolitan universities to up their intake of health students from country backgrounds.
“We need to be better at providing incentives for rural based training opportunities,” he said. "Often the cost of doing it can be a disincentive.”
Associate Professor Smith said the biggest challenge in rural recruitment was convincing urban university graduates to consider a career in the country.
He also spoke highly of Tamworth’s current health facilities, including the redeveloped hospital and the North West Cancer Centre and saw potential for a university to capitalise on the city as a gateway for a growing regional health workforce.
“It might not be a university campus, but something like post-grad training,” he said. “In the last 15 years, Tamworth has become an important education centre.
Tamworth’s existing infrastructure and current training programs put the city in an good position to capitalise on other findings from the report. Researchers found young professionals were heavily influenced by positive clinical and personal rural experiences, including a sense of connection to people, place and community.
Among the Rural Health Workforce Australia’s (RHWA) recommendations were, a structured rural graduate program for allied health, similar to that offered for medicine and nursing and a positive marketing of rural careers as professionally rewarding, with solid ‘generalist’ foundations for clinical practice.
“Nursing and allied health professionals such as physiotherapists and psychologists are critical to meeting the health needs of rural and remote Australians,” RHWA chair Dr Ross Maxwell said.
“We believe this report is timely given the Australian Government’s greater emphasis on the role of Australian-trained graduates in addressing maldistribution of health workforce in rural Australia.”