Location and access to health courses for rural students: an Australian audit

Carol McKinstry; Claire Quilliam; Nicole Crawford; Jason Thompson; Stephanie Millns Sizer

doi:10.1186/s12909-024-05787-3

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Location and access to health courses for rural students: an Australian audit

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Location and access to health courses for rural students: an Australian audit

Carol McKinstry, Claire Quilliam, Nicole Crawford, Jason Thompson and Stephanie Millns Sizer

BMC Medical Education, Vol.24, pp.1-13

2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05787-3

PMCID: PMC11285131

PMID: 39075529

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Abstract

Access

Allied health

Dental

Health courses

Higher education

Medicine

Nursing

Rural workforce

Student equity

Background: The undersupply of health professionals in rural areas impacts healthcare access for those living in rural Australia. A strategy to increase the rural health workforce is to recruit and educate rural people. However, long-standing inequities for rural Australians in accessing tertiary education persist. The aim of this study was to audit the 2023 offerings of Australian allied health, nursing, dental and medical university courses to identify geographical availability and those delivered online. Methods: A desktop audit of Australian allied health, nursing, dental and medical courses offered in 2023 was undertaken to identify the courses and delivery modes of those courses offered in regional, rural and remote locations. The audit involved searching lists of professionally accredited courses and university websites, which is publicly available information about health courses. Data were tabulated and descriptive statistics used for data analysis. Results: There were marked differences in online and rural course offerings across health professions in Modified Monash (MM) Model category 2-7 locations. Nursing/midwifery had the most courses while pharmacy, podiatry, dental and medicine had few offerings and optometry had none. Social work, nursing/midwifery and psychology also had the most online course offerings. Most courses were offered in MM2 and MM3 locations with few offerings in rural or remote areas. The availability of studying part-time was very limited and often this was only for the early years of the course. Inconsistencies relating to the course information on university websites existed relating to course delivery mode descriptions. Conclusions: There is a lack of rural on-campus or online course offerings for some allied health disciplines, dentistry and medicine. Provision of end-to-end, flexible courses in rural areas or online is needed to reduce access barriers for rural students and to enable sustainable rural health workforce development.

Details

Title: Location and access to health courses for rural students: an Australian audit
Authors: Carol McKinstry - La Trobe University
Claire Quilliam - The University of Melbourne
Nicole Crawford - Curtin University
Jason Thompson - The University of Melbourne
Stephanie Millns Sizer - Geraldton Universities Centre (Australia)
Publication details: BMC Medical Education, Vol.24, pp.1-13
Publisher: BioMed Central Ltd.
Date published: 2024
DOI: 10.1186/s12909-024-05787-3
ISSN: 1472-6920
PMID: 39075529; PMC11285131
Copyright note: © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Data Availability: All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
Grant note: This work was supported by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training Programme.
Organisation Unit: Centre for Human Factors and Systems Science
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991184302602621
Output Type: Journal article

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Web Of Science research areas: Education & Educational Research; Education, Scientific Disciplines

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