Dr Jane George - Recruitment and Retention of Rural Allied Health Professionals

 Dr Jane George is a health workforce consultant and academic from New Zealand, specialising in rural workforce and the Allied Health, Scientific, and Technical professions.  

Episode summary:

01.00  Jane introduces herself using a traditional way

03.10  Jane tells her about how she became interested in rural health

07.15  What does she find most enjoyable about rural areas and what she finds most challenging?

12.50  Why did she decide to focus her research on the rural health workforce and allied health professionals?

15.30  What kind of roles do allied health professionals hold?

18.15  Is there a good distribution of allied health professionals?

21.00  What challenges are facing the rural health workforce?

24.10  Do allied health professionals have access to rural based training or rural training pathways?

26.20  What has she learned through her research about attracting and retaining allied health professionals?

28.15  What factors were getting overlooked and why were they important?

31.34  Jane expands on the themes of her research

38.10  What are her top recommendations for local healthcare organizations and for national level policy?

46.15  What is she working on at the moment?

 

Key Messages:

The things she loves about being rural are also the most challenging things.  Wide scope of practice and the can do attitude.  We are never far from the people we serve.  Endless opportunities for advocacy.  Surrounded by inequity which provides motivation to improve what we do.  Opportunities to challenge geographical narcissism.  

How do we get better at recruiting and retaining the workforce? This was the question she was searching for an answer for.  She chose to focus on what matters to allied health professionals to identify what would best attract and retain them. Finding out what made rural work worthwhile.

Allied health professions in rural areas can be pharmacist, physiotherapist, podiatrist, occupational therapists, medical laboratory scientist, radiology technicians, social workers and more. 

It can be difficult to know what the distribution of allied health professionals is across different regions.  The government is working on monitoring this better.

Service challenges and professional challenges.  The amount of travel that is required, isolation of practice, reduced episodes of care available to stay current.  Reduced access to professional development, and a constant need to be pushing back against urban narcissism. 

Social work is a great example of rural based training, as they have been providing distance training for over 10 years.  Speech language therapy has recently developed a distance learning program.  

She developed 20 recommendations for rural health providers, managers, recruiters and regulatory authorities.  Shaped through the narratives of the participants and the key themes of her research.

Keyt themes were: 1) sense of connection and belonging, 2) safe and supportive practice, 3) creating roles the people want to go for.

Negative press, how rural communities are talked about in the media, we are starting to believe what is being said about rural areas - that it is not as good, that people there are not as skilled, that these areas are not well resources… - we can overlook common sense and practical actions we can take.

Important to think about how we value and trust staff, how we help them settle and develop local connections. 

Do the current policies work for local communities and local staff? Are we listening to local communities and staff, what are they telling us they need?

Thinking about if what we are requesting of rural health professionals is reasonable, for example, are staff safe if they are visiting places on their own, how long will they need to travel to do their role, are we making professional support and development available. 

Recommendations for local health organizations: 

1. Reality check - think about is this reasonable to ask of our professionals, are we thinking about staff safety, are we designing the work for the context of rural

2. How are you talking about rural areas? Be mindful of urban narcissism, recognize the strengths of rural communities. Represent rural professionals as valuable and knowledgeable.

3. How you treat people will determine if people come and stay.

4. Involve everyone in decision making.

5. Value the learning needs of allied health professionals and make learning resources available.

Recommendations for national policy:

1. Making policies and procedures that are fit for rural communities.  It needs to be flexible enough to fit rural contexts

2. Involve everyone in decision making

3. Be mindful of biases, use rural proofing tools to check that you are thinking rurally. Use health equity assessment tools.

4. Education policy and regulatory policy is also important for training and regulation professions play a role in developing and recognizing rural professions, advanced practice and rural generalism. 

 

Dr Jane George on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janegeorgenz/ 

Email: [email protected]  

https://www.drjanegeorge.co.nz/

 

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Rural Health Compass