title: Does teaching an entire nursing degree rurally have more workforce impact than rural placements?
abstract: Education plays a key role in recruitment of health workforce to rural and remote locations. In Australia, Schools of Nursing have set up a variety of educational programmes to encourage rural workforce choices. These programmes include rural campuses and short-term rural placement programmes out of urban campuses. This study compares the relative workforce impacts of rural campus versus short-term rural placements out of urban campus. The single outcome measure - rural or urban location after graduation - showed that the rural school graduated a significantly higher proportion of rural-working graduates (chi(2) 4.46, p = 0.04). However there was no difference in the rural workforce choices of students from rural backgrounds, irrespective of their university location (chi(2) = 1.45, p = 0.23). We conclude that both rural universities and affirmative action for selecting rural students into nursing programmes are effective workforce strategies, but that rural campuses have the added benefit of encouraging under-represented rural students to access university education.
authors.affiliation: Previously Combined University Centre for Rural Health, currently The Rural Clinical School of Western Australia, The University of Western Australia, Crawley WA, Australia.
authors.forename: Denese
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Playford
authors.forename: Belynda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wheatland
authors.forename: Ann
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Larson
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D002321:Career Choice; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D002983:Clinical Competence; D004508:Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate / Q000458:organization & administration; D004651:Employment / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D015401:Nursing Administration Research; D015402:Nursing Education Research; D010560:Personnel Selection / Q000458:organization & administration; D011365:Professional Practice Location; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D019035:Rural Health Services; D012579:Schools, Nursing / Q000458:organization & administration*; D013338:Students, Nursing / Q000523:psychology*; D019037:Urban Health Services; D014904:Western Australia; D000078329:Workforce