New website to attract nurses to rural areas
Updated
To healthcare in Australia, and instead of fruitpicking, nurses who are travelling around Australia are being encouraged to work in rural hospitals to meet critical staff shortages.
Catholic Health Australia has launched a new website that's part travel guide and part job agency. And with a third of the current nursing workforce close to retirement age, the website aims to attract those nurses thinking of joining the so called "grey nomad" brigade - retired couples who take long caravaning trips around Australia.
Presenter: Jennifer Macey
Speakers: Penny Wright, nurse; Caroline Hudson from the Mater Health Services in Brisbane; Kate Birrell, group director of Nursing for the St John of God Health Care
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JENNIFER MACEY: Unlike most of her friends, 23-year old nurse Penny Wright didn't take a year off after school to travel overseas. Now after three years of working at the Mater Private hospital in Brisbane she's ready to hit the road.
PENNY WRIGHT: I've just finished work today and next Wednesday I take off in my car to go travelling, starting down south and then travel all the way around the coastline of Australia.
JENNIFER MACEY: And instead of following the fruit picking season around the country, Penny Wright is plotting her route using the website Nurse The Nation to look for short term jobs in hospitals.
PENNY WRIGHT: I've started to look at where I want to go first. I've looked at Wagga Wagga and Cessnock and Newcastle, and just deciding where I want to go first. The reason that I am travelling around Australia is for different challenges and to try different areas of nursing and to challenge myself to do rural nursing as well as the big smoke. So I may as well, while I am travelling and seeing Australia, continue with my career.
JENNIFER MACEY: The website is the brainchild of Caroline Hudson from the Mater Health Services in Brisbane. She says it's aimed at nursing graduates, semi-retired nurses and overseas backpackers with the right qualifications.
CAROLINE HUDSON: It's more difficult to attract nurses and midwives to the country and so this is one way. We are not actually asking everybody to have a sea change and leave and go live permanently in the country but this is one way for them to actually establish a workforce from a group of people who might be travelling through town for a month, a week, a few days, or whatever period they want.
JENNIFER MACEY: She says there's a national shortfall of up to 13,000 nurses and a third of the existing workforce is close to retirement age.
CAROLINE HUDSON: And this way we can kind of halt that decision to retire and allow them to do it slowly as they move around the country.
JENNIFER MACEY: Rural hospitals in particular struggle to find full-time and specialised staff.
Kate Birrell is the group director of Nursing for the St John of God Health Care which has hospitals in Geraldton and Bunbury in Western Australia and Warrnambool and Bendigo in Victoria.
KATE BIRRELL: In Geraldton in particular, in WA, yes it is very difficult to recruit specialist nurses in particular into those areas and highly skilled specialist nurses because it is remote and very often the people who have those skills, they want to be in the bigger units in the city.
JENNIFER MACEY: She's hopeful the website will attract more nurses into the country.
KATE BIRRELL: It just allows some creativity and flexibility into our workforce for our rural hospitals and we would anticipate that then it gives them that experience and they very much might really enjoy it and consider a longer term appointment then.
JENNIFER MACEY: And she says nurses hoping to travel this way first have to get registered in each state or territory they plan to visit.
