Recruitment and retention of remote and rural health care staff: making it work

Recruiting and retaining health care staff and other skilled employees is a common problem in remote and rural communities. There is no single solution to inadequate workforce supply; a whole system approach should be taken to address this complex issue. Multiple initiatives that bring incremental improvements are most likely to ensure an overall impact. Making it Work (MIW) will implement five recruitment and retention case studies, at scale, across Northern Europe and Canada, using a business model tailored to local and regional needs. This will develop previous work which sought to understand recruitment and retention issues, and which proposed a series of solutions, and a business model. MIW will apply a community focussed lens, a detailed planning process, system redesign, and will conduct a structured evaluation highlighting costs and benefits of intervention. A flexible policy framework and a practical online toolkit will be developed to allow knowledge transfer of key factors of success. This workshop will describe the results of previous work in more detail, and will outline the approach to MIW. Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences, and to consider innovative solutions to this complex issue.

This abstract was presented at the Innovative Solutions in Remote Healthcare - 'Rethinking Remote' conference, 23-24 May 2016, Inverness, Scotland.