- Title
- Building the rural dietetics workforce: a bright future?
- Creator
- Brown, Leanne; Williams, Lauren; Squires, Kelly
- Relation
- 12th National Rural Health Conference. Proceedings of the 12th National Rural Health Conference (Adelaide, S.A. 7-10 April, 2013)
- Relation
- http://nrha.org.au/12nrhc/
- Publisher
- National Rural Health Alliance
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Dietitians play an important role in the provision of services to address the chronic disease epidemic in rural Australia. The lack of detailed workforce data especially for rural and remote areas is an issue for the dietetics profession, as the development of a best practice dietetic workforce is reliant on adequate data about the current and projected workforce numbers and employment trends. Previous research has reported on the dietetics workforce across sites in rural New South Wales (NSW) and as a small subset of allied health workforce surveys. Census data has also provided some data for comparison across Australia in rural and metropolitan areas. The dietetics profession has grown and diversified over the past 20 years with the expansion of the private practice sector and ad hoc funding opportunities for largely project and short-term positions. Despite this the profession is under-represented in rural and remote areas compared with urban areas. It has previously been reported 32% of the rural population is being serviced by 24% of the workforce, of which approximately one quarter are new graduates. The dietetics profession is relatively small, young and female dominated, which may pose issues with recruitment and retention. Problems experienced by the workforce include high turnover, a fragmented part-time workforce and disruptions to career, and as a result, a fragmented workforce. National data show that approximately 50-60% of dietitians work full-time hours and there is a trend towards obtaining full-time work through multiple part-time jobs. Given the fragmented nature of existing workforce data, a clear picture of the dietetics workforce in Australia remains to be elucidated. Previous research has found that dietetic services in rural areas of NSW are typically based in the public sector, with limited private practice services available. The largest proportion of the workforce continues to be hospital-based clinical dietitans, however in recent years the dietetics workforce has grown in the areas of industry and private practice. According to the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) membership database between 2005 and 2007 the number of dietitians in private practice in Australia increased by 35%. This shows the growing diversification of the profession beyond the traditional clinical role, but how much of this growth is in rural areas is unknown. A range of factors identified as potential barriers or facilitators to the development of a best practice dietetic service in rural areas have been identified and a theoretical model proposed. Contributing factors include funding and management, whilst direct influences are based on the number of positions, recruitment and retention issues, service organisation and delivery methods and overall resourcing. It is acknowledged the number of dietitians is not solely responsible for the provision of best practice dietetic services, however, it is a direct influence and will be the focus of this paper.
- Subject
- dietitians; rural Australia; dietetics
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1301234
- Identifier
- uon:20241
- Language
- eng
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