Getting doctors to stay permanently in rural areas is a thing of the past, says Catherine Cosgrave.
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Dr Cosgrave works to address chronic workforce shortages by attracting and retaining skilled professionals.
Through her work, she's seeing medical practices close in rural areas "at a rate we've never seen before".
Because of that, Dr Cosgrave - who runs Cath Cosgrave Consulting - said organisations needed to rethink what attraction and retention looked like.
Speaking about rural and remote health at Regional Development Australia's Inland Growth Summit, Dr Cosgrave said employers needed to stop having an "entitled model of recruitment" where they asked the potential employer what they could do for the business. Instead, they needed to start asking what they could do for the employer.
That may involve helping find accommodation, or helping find work for their partner or being flexible with days and hours, Dr Cosgrave said. Anything to make them feel more welcome and connected to the community.
"We should be open to everything. Fly in, fly out, drive in, drive out, some kind of hybrid model," she said.
Dr Cosgrave said it was both simple and hard work, but employers had to change.
On Tuesday, February 27, there were 209 healthcare jobs advertised on Seek for Orange and a 50 kilometres radius.
According to a Westfund report released in November 2023, there are only 33 ancillary service providers - such as dentists, optometrists, physiotherapists, podiatrists, and psychologists - per 1000 people in Orange.
It's the same story in Bathurst and Dubbo with 27 and 30 (respectively) ancillary services providers apiece.
Dr Cosgrave said employers also needed to accept early career health professionals didn't want to stay in regional areas.
"Young people won't stay for more than two years. They want to have life experiences and we should encourage them to have life experiences.
"When I used to tell health services they were doing well if they got two years retention they felt better."
The consultant said it wasn't simply a case of training people in rural and regional areas to stay in rural and regional areas.
"I actually think it's really depressing that we want our young people to only do those things if they come back. I want them to have as much choice as their city cousins do. Some will come back, others won't, but some people from the city will come," Dr Cosgrave said.
"So we need to have really open eyes to everything and be fishing really widely because there are lots of people in city places that would love to work in rural and are a good fit for it."