Education and Training Projects

Promotion of health careers to rural secondary school students 

A CUCRH initiative is to promote health careers to rural secondary school students. To view the material prepared for these workshops click here.

Several research projects have been conducted to inform our activities.

First, with funding from the Western Australian government extensive consultations with rural and remote students, parents and teachers were conducted to determine barriers to tertiary health studies and preferred sources and medium of information. The results have been published in the Australian Journal of Rural Health (Durey, McNamara and Larson 2003).

Second, under Ann Larson’s direction fourth year medical students Jarrad Watt and Daniel Claughton designed a questionnaire for successive Year 11 students to measure changes in knowledge, intentions and perceived barriers to pursuing university-level health courses.  This survey has been repeated twice in Geraldton and once in an outer metropolitan school.  Some results can be found Australian Journal of Career Development (Shaw and Larson 2003).

Expanding rural health undergraduate curriculum 

This project seeks to enhance the rural curricula across the health science disciplines. Following a stocktake of rural content for each discipline and a review of the perceptions of recent graduates from these disciplines who are now working in rural areas, CUCRH is  working with academic co-ordinators and rural health professionals to examine methods that can enhance the rural curricula.  If successful, we believe that overtime we will see measurable increases in the number of students willing to undertake a rural placement, the number of graduates seeking rural employment and the number of new rural health recruits who feel adequately prepared for rural practice.  

Rural health promotion competencies

This national project was conducted in conjunction with the Health Promotion Association of WA on behalf of the National Public Health Partnerships Workforce Development group. It determined the competencies required of health promotion practitioners in Australia. CUCRH was specifically interested in identifying the competencies that relate to rural/remote practitioners.  A subset of rural practitioners were analysed separately and the findings have been published in Health Promotion Journal of Australia (Shilton, Lower, Howat and James 2003). The authors found that rural health promotion practice required significantly higher levels of competency in use of media, research and evaluation and information technology. This information has been important in directing the content of training and support CUCRH gives health promotion officers.