Beyond the Workforce Crisis
Advancing Conceptual Understanding in Rural and Remote Health
Funded by the Australian Research Council
It is now time that rural and remote health move beyond reactive approaches to the workforce crisis and develop a comprehensive understanding of the discipline and its practice.
The aim of the two year project is to develop an innovative, theoretical framework to understand rural and remote health as a basis for improving it. By bringing together a team of Australian rural health researchers/thinkers/practitioners, a current theoretical position on rural health will be developed, discussed, critiqued by policy makers and practitioners and submitted for academic review.
The project will be conducted in two stages. First, the literature will be searched in key topic areas; definitions of rural and remote health, disadvantage, and community, integration and power. The material will be integrated through workshops and the tentative framework developed will be critiqued by rural health experts. input on the framework to achieve intellectual development of the framework. In the second year the team will seek input from a diverse range of people in remote and rural health, Indigenous health, rural primary health care, public health, along with those working in education, research, policy and practice.
