title: Nursing as a career choice: perceptions of school students speaking Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Turkish or Vietnamese at home.
abstract: Australia is a multicultural society and nowhere is this more evident than in Sydney where 25% of the population speaks a language other than English. In one of the largest area health services in New South Wales, the five most frequently spoken languages at home are Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Turkish or Vietnamese, with these language groups comprising 12% of Sydney's population. Yet nurses speaking one of these five languages comprise less than 1% of the nursing workforce. A cost-effective method of addressing the shortage of nurses speaking languages other than English is to recruit students who already speak another language into the profession. This study examined high school students' perceptions of nursing in order to determine appropriate methods of recruiting students speaking one of these languages. Implications for the design of recruitment campaigns are also discussed.
authors.affiliation: Australian Centre for Health Promotion, Department of Public Health andCommunity Medicine, University of Sydney.
authors.forename: K C
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Duffield
authors.forename: X C
authors.initials: XC
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Choucair
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Creegan
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mak
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lesley
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D002321:Career Choice; D004506:Education, Nursing; D005006:Ethnicity; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009517:New South Wales; D009729:Nursing; D012570:School Admission Criteria; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D000078329:Workforce