Health Careers Education for Rural Primary Schoolchildren‪.‬

Rural and remote Australia face a severe, chronic shortage of a diverse range of health professionals. For many years Australian and overseas studies have reported that health professionals who grew up in a rural area are more likely to return to work in a rural area after graduation than colleagues raised in the city (Hoyal, 1994; Hughes et al., 2005; Humphreys, Prideaux, Beilby & Glasgow, 2009; National Rural Health Association, 2005; Strasser, 1992; Wilkinson, Beilby, Thompson, Laven, Chamberlain & Laurence, 2000). But the pathway between students living in rural and remote Australia and health professional careers is not a very accessible one. In Alloway, Gilbert, Gilbert and Muspratt's (2004) study of high school students in regional, rural and remote Australia, the students' teachers and parents reported 'a lack of occupational models in rural communities meant that students had fewer images from which to draw in envisioning what they might become' (p. 249). This matches what rural secondary students asked in an earlier Australian study looking at health careers: 'How do you know what to do if you haven't had the chance to find out?' (Heaney, 1998, p. 29). When the terms 'health professionals' or 'health care workers' are used, these terms include but are not restricted to nurses, dentists, doctors, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, social workers, podiatrists, audiologists, radiologists, pharmacists and pathology scientists. The term 'health professions' refers to the many vocations these professionals can pursue as a career.