The presentation was from one of the keynote speakers Julie Hulcombe, Chief Allied Health Officer at the Queensland Department of Health’s Allied Health Professions’ Office of Queensland.

Ms Hulcombe provides advice to the Minister and department director-general on national standards and policies and she gave an overview of what services her office provides and how it supports rural practice such as in training programs, expanding scope of practice, clinical research and empowering networks.

The slide from her presentation that most interested me was called “challenges of rural practice”. Ms Hulcombe spoke about the difficulties of recruiting and retaining staff, the harder access to training compared to city folk, the difficulties of obtaining locum and backfill support, issues around professional isolation and how to integrate workers into the community.

What struck me about all those issues was how transferable they were to any industry, corporate department or business that operates in rural and remote areas.

It was the same with the positives Ms Hulcombe identified: a broader case load than urban counterparts, a reliance on teamwork, well placed to share skills, the autonomy of working remote, the opportunities for innovation and of course, the rural lifestyle.

None of these are specifically health related. Indeed the problems Ms Hulcombe faces and the solutions she identified to those problems are shared by me in the media industry and shared by many others in their occupations.

I’ve met a young dentist doing complex orthopaedic surgery they would never have seen in the city and a young outback cop who loved their diverse job and rural lifestyle and glad they weren’t on boring traffic patrol in Brisbane.

Ms Hulcombe reminds us the need to better sell the positives of rural living to those attracted to a stimulating career. Derek Barry