Rural healthcare is becoming a core feature in the undergraduate curricula of the Faculty of Health Science at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Tasmania, like the rest of the world, has a shortage of health professionals working in rural and remote areas. Because nurses represent the largest discipline in the health workforce, the shortfalls have a devastating impact on rural and remote communities. The past decade has been characterised by some notable initiatives that are designed to address the maldistributed health workforce. At the undergraduate level various incentives are resulting in increased emphasis on rural practice in pre-qualifying health science education. In terms of the rural undergraduate program, the Tasmanian School of Nursing does not receive the same level of support as the Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy.
Consequently, the University Department of Rural Health in Tasmania provides some monetary support to assist with providing nursing students with rural practice experience. Providing undergraduate students with rural clinical exposure is consistently reported as a strategy for dealing with the rural workforce shortage. Evidence to support this assertion is still emerging. While the majority of studies report an intention to take up a rural post after graduation and few actually measure behavioural outcomes, there is a sense that well-supported rural placements can have a positive effect on students’ commitment to rural practice. Nursing students regard experiential clinical learning opportunities as crucial experience for advancing their professional and clinical knowledge. Because most undergraduate students enrolled in undergraduate health science programs do not have a rural background, they view rural clinical practice from an uninformed position. When faced with decisions about where they may want to undertake clinical practice, they may regard the prospect of a rural placement as being disadvantageous to their professional development. Strasser reports that, from an undergraduate viewpoint, the advantages of rural placements may be outweighed by the perceived disadvantages. There is a risk that undergraduate nursing students may regard rural placements as a waste of time. During experiential clinical practice nursing students classify the major categories of learning as nursing skills, time management and professional socialisation. This article will present one of the themes that was developed in an ethnographic hermeneutic study that explored the experiences of undergraduate student nurse first engagements with rural clinical practice. It presents how the nursing students initially expected to spend their time caring for people, but realised they first needed to spend their time learning about rural nursing before they could do the work of rural nursing. The findings indicate that rural placements are rich learning environments where undergraduate nursing students can advance their nursing skills, time management and professional socialisation in a positive an productive way.
Download
Time As A Source of Conflict
