Background: Allied health (AH) workforce shortages in remote and rural Australia contribute to poorer health outcomes for residents in those areas. This gap in health workforce has long been recognised as problematic and persists despite strategies for improving recruitment and retention of AH professionals. This thesis reports on a new approach to addressing the recruitment to, and retention in, remote areas of AH professionals by investigating the personal traits and motivation characteristics of AH professionals with and without remote area work experience. Recent research has shown that the nursing and medical professions can be differentiated by personality traits, but little is known about the personality traits of AH professionals. Therefore, this research aimed to address that knowledge gap.The aim of the study was to identify the personality traits and motivation characteristics that might assist an individual to 'thrive' rather than 'survive' in the remote work environment. It Health achieved a sample size of 562 AH professionals, with full demographic data and a completed TCI. Dependent variables were the TCI dimensions, while independent variables were remote experience, gender, age, profession and grouping of the professions as either person-or technique-oriented. Analysis was descriptive of the whole sample and comparative between groups using independent samples t-test, ANOVA and subsequent two-way ANOVA with 95% confidence level.Strand 2 used Personal Construct Psychology's key technique, the repertory grid interview, to understand how AH professionals construed working in remote areas, in terms of the personal traits and motivation that contribute to success. Participants (n=34) were a purposively selected subset of Strand 1. The repertory grid interviews produced both iii qualitative and quantitative data. These were analysed qualitatively to identify the personal and motivation characteristics, and quantitatively using singular value decomposition and Euclidean distance to compare differences construed by participants between remote and other AH work situations.
Results:The following key findings were determined from personality trait results, together with the repertory grid results: The AH professionals appear to have mature personality characteristics, i.e. high or very high levels of Reward Dependence, Persistence, Self-directedness and Cooperativeness. The AH professionals with remote experience had higher Novelty Seeking and average Harm Avoidance levels compared with AH professionals without remote experience. Younger AH professionals tended towards higher Harm Avoidance levels.