Supporting staff childcare needs can be an adjunct to an effective recruitment and retention strategy : a short report

Globally, rural areas continue to struggle with the recruit-ment and retention of their rural health care workforce. In Australia, the Government has responded to this need by implementing the Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training Program to provide rural immersion experiences to health students to increase the likelihood of rural prac-tice on graduation.1Whilst this and other initiatives provide an avenue for increasing recruitment of health care staff, they do not specifically address retention of the rural health work-force. Retention is a multifaceted issue, with an individ-ual's experience of their workplace situation/conditions, their perception of career development and advancement opportunities, as well as personal and community factors influencing their decisions in this space.2,3 For each indi-vidual, these factors can act as either push or pull factors, driving them to leave their rural post (push) or influencing them to stay (pull).2,4 These retention drivers are neatly captured in the 'Whole-of- Person Retention Improvement Framework' suggested by Cosgrave.5 This framework broadly categorises the influencers of retention into 3 domains: workplace/organisational, role and personal.5Whilst workplace/organisational and role- related influ-encers have been researched extensively, there is a need to examine more closely the personal factors that influence an individual's turnover intention.5 Hospital employees are generally required to work long hours and undertake shift work, which does not fit in with traditional childcare opening hours. Anecdotal evidence from a regional centre suggests that the limited availability of suitable childcare and out of school care is negatively impacting hospital staff well- being, recruitment and retention; however, pub-lished evidence is scant. The aim of this pilot study, there-fore, was to examine the childcare needs of hospital staff in a regional centre and the perceived impact this has on staff availability, recruitment and retention.