Rural Amenity and Medical Workforce Shortage: Is there a Relationship?

Abstract

Rural Australia continues to experience a chronic medical workforce shortage. For a variety of reasons, recruiting to and retaining medical professionals in many rural communities remain difficult. A place's amenity is often cited as a significant contributing factor towards the differential attractiveness of different rural and remote practice locations for doctors. This study investigates the extent to which there is an association between medical workforce shortage across rural Australia and a selection of place characteristics descriptive of their isolation, climate, and overall rural amenity. Our main outcome measure, District of Workforce Shortage (DWS) designation, has been employed for over a decade to identify areas eligible for incentive measures designed to overcome the chronic rural medical workforce shortage. Somewhat surprisingly, our study found only a weak association between DWS and our measure of rural amenity. In contrast, alternative measures of medical workforce shortage showed a moderate-to-strong association with rural amenity. The weak explanatory value of rural amenity may reflect the limitations of the DWS measure or the lesser significance of rural amenity compared with other professional aspects relating to where doctors take up practice. Findings from this study also suggest that the current DWS measure provides an inadequate basis for targeting recruitment and retention incentives.