Photo: monkeyc.net
I am off to Brisbane and the Gold Coast tomorrow, primarily to attend a conference about recruitment and retention in the health professions. This is an issue I am extremely interested in as it is a prevalent problem throughout the health professions internationally, not just here in New Zealand. Obviously I come from a midwifery perspective but I believe the issues are generic: aging population of practitioners; recruiting young people into the professions; supporting new graduates; supporting rural & remote practitioners; encouraging professional development -these are just a few of the issues.
So my aims for attending my conference are:
1. to find out more about what can be effective strategies for improving recruitment and retention;
2. to network with people I wouldn't otherwise meet;
3. get my name known as a midwife and midwifery educator who could be a collaborative partner in research/project work in the future.
I will be presenting a paper about the efficacy of e-mentoring as a recruitment and retention strategy. This will be more of a theoretical perspective because I do not have any solid data to present about my study yet. However, hopefully it will get people thinking about the possibilities of social networking as a means of supporting staff, with the end result of retaining them in their jobs.
4 comments:
Good luck Sarah and will be very keen to hear how it all went and whether others were talking about web 2.0 or not - hope you do some postings from the conference?
Thanks for that, Merrolee. I should think the content of the conference will be just as relevant to OTs as it is to midwives, so I'll let you know how it goes. I certainly plan to post from the conference but that will depend on my access to wireless. As to the discussion about about web 2.0-I should imagine that very few people have heard of it, but I may be surprised.
I've picked up presentations I think from this conference before - there are always OT's presenting so will be curious to hear who you run into and what they are presenting on. Remember to take business cards with you and put our blogs on the back!!! Great advertising!
Must away - love the photos by the way!
Merrolee
This is such a great opportunity Sarah. I was really struck by what a burning issue this is for our third yr students who are about to embark on the start of their working careers in the New Year - so any updates or insights in this area will be a welcome addition to our school / programme not to mention the profession at large. It will also no doubt be really valuable for us as we introduce a new paper on sustainability. Look forward to hearing all about it.
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