Can rural health experiences have a workforce impact through Virtual Reality?

Background: Across Australia, there are significant challenges to recruiting healthcare professionals to work rurally. Innovative approaches are needed to supplement existing workforce strategies. While traditional approaches to growing the rural health workforce, such as rural student placements can be effective, they are associated with significant cost, capacity, and accessibility barriers, limiting their scalability and impact. Virtual Reality (VR) technology offers a cost-effective and scalable solution to provide immersive rural experiences, potentially increasing interest in rural health careers and addressing workforce shortages.

Aim: To assess the impact of an immersive VR experience on interest in rural health careers, as a supplementary strategy to address rural workforce shortages.

Methods: Researchers collaborated with a rural health organisation in Victoria to co-create an immersive VR experience. This experience portrayed both job-related aspects within the healthcare organisation, and lifestyle elements within the rural town. The VR experience was introduced to metropolitan-based health students and professionals at career fairs and other similar events, and its impact was evaluated after receiving ethics approval. Before viewing the VR experience, participants completed a pre-survey to measure their baseline attitudes, self-efficacy, interest, and intentions towards rural health careers. Immediately following the VR experience, participants completed a post-survey to assess changes in attitudes and intentions. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with a subset of participants to explore their perceptions and experiences in greater depth. Preliminary analysis has been undertaken.

Results: The process of developing a VR intervention for rural recruitment highlighted some ethical, engagement and technical considerations. Preliminary analysis of survey and interview data highlighted how VR can stimulate interest in rural practice, how some aspects of rural careers were new to participants, and many of the themes to influence decisions to work rurally were considered by participants. There were also some new insights from participants about their assumptions of living and working rurally and the influences on decisions of where to seek work.

Conclusions: Our project demonstrates the potential of VR technology in addressing rural health workforce challenges. By providing immersive experiences that authentically capture rural practice and lifestyles, VR holds promise in attracting healthcare professionals to underserved areas. Further analysis of our data will provide deeper insights into the impact of VR experiences on participants’ career aspirations. There is a need for additional research exploring the long-term effectiveness and scalability of VR-based recruitment strategies in healthcare.